BV  2  30  .a:  i.:?±L 

Aked,  Charles  F.  1864-1926 

The  Lord's  prayer 


The  Lord's  Prayer 


The  Lord's  Prayer 


Its  Meaning  and 
Message  for  To-day 


By 
CHARLES  F.  AKED,  D.  D. 

Minister  of  the  Fifth  Avenue  Baptist  Church, 
New  York  City 


New  York  Chicago  Toronto 

Fleming      H.      Revell      Company 

London  and  Edinburgh 


Copyright,  igio,  by 
FLEMING   H.    REVELL  COMPANY 


New  York:  158  Fifth  Avenue 
Chicago:  80  Wabash  Avenue 
Toronto:  25  Richmond  Street,  W. 
London:  21  Paternoster  Square 
Edinburgh:      100    Princes    Street 


To 

My  Loyal  and  Loving  Comrades 

the 

Trustees  and  Deacons 

of  the 

Fifth  Avenue  Baptist  Church, 

in 

Cordial  Appreciation 

of  their 

Endeavour  to  Realize 

in 

Human  Affairs 

the 

Meaning  and  Message  of  the  Lord*s 

Prayer 


Contents 


PAGB 

L 

Our  Father.^  Who  Art  in  Heaven 

II 

II. 

Hallowed  Be  Thy  Name     . 

37 

III. 

Thy  Kingdom  Come    .... 

59 

IF. 

Thy  Will  Be  Done^  As  In  Heaven^  So 
On  Earth 

S5 

V. 

Give  Us  This  Day  Our  Daily  Bread  . 

log 

VI 

Forgive    Us   Our    Debts,  As  We  Also 
Have  Forgiven  Our  Debtors 

i2g 

VIL 

Bring    Us    Not  Into  Temptation,   But 
Deliver  Us  From  the  Evil    . 

153 

[7] 


©WR  jfatber,  wbo  art  in 
Heaven,  Mallowe^  be 
^bi5  name^  ^b^  1ktnot)om 
come,  ^b^  will  be  bone,  ae 
in  beaven,  eo  on  eartb.  (5tve 
U6  tbi0  bai?  our  baili^  breat), 
Hnb  forgive  m  our  bebts, 
a0  we  al0O  bave  forgiven  our 
bebtore,  Hub  bring  U0  not 
into  temptation,  but  beliver 
U0  from  tbe  evil* 


[9] 


I 

Our  Father^  Who  Art  in  Heaven 


....  With  filial  confidence  inspired, 
Can  lift  to  heaven  an  unpresumptuous  eye, 
And  smiling  say,  "  My  Father  made  it  all !  " 

'—Cowper, 


OUR  FATHER,  WHO  ART  IN  HEAVEN 

IS  there  anything  new  to  be  said  about  the 
Lord's  Prayer  ?  And  will  this  busy  world 
condescend  to  heed  ?  Has  it  any  meaning, 
any  message,  for  the  men  and  women  of  our  day  ? 
All  that  can  be  said  surely  has  been  said — has 
been  said  ten  thousand  times  ten  thousand  times 
in  every  language  and  in  all  generations  since  the 
Hill  Sermon  was  preached  by  Jesus  Christ.  Yet 
one  of  the  really  surprising  things  in  human  life 
is  our  ignorance  of  those  things  about  which  we 
suppose  we  know  so  much.  Let  us  admit  that 
the  meaning  and  message  of  the  Prayer  are  old, 
wonderfully  old,  and  still  we  may  be  thankful  for 
the  new.  We  worship  a  God  who,  as  Tennyson 
says,  "  fulfills  Himself  from  day  to  day,"  and  who, 
according  to  the  vision  of  John,  sits  upon  the 
throne  and  says,  Behold,  I  make  all  things  new. 
Yet  amongst  the  oldest  things  of  life  are  some  of 
the  greatest  and  dearest.  Motherhood  and 
[13] 


The  Lord^s  Prayer 


fatherhood  are  old — all  but  the  oldest  facts  and 
forces  in  the  life-story  of  the  human  race.  And 
love  is  old ;  when  it  throbs  in  fresh  young  hearts 
and  opens  wonder-worlds  and  mystic  heavens  to 
man  and  maid,  themselves  divinely  new  beneath 
its  kindling  touch,  it  is  old  with  the  primeval  im- 
pulse of  the  Eden  story  and  with  the  yet  older 
and  compelling  passion  of  the  Eternal  who 
"  dove-like  sat  brooding  o'er  the  vast  abyss,"  of 
whom  the  Scripture  says  God  is  l&ve.  The  old 
truths  of  the  Lord's  Prayer  may  yet  appeal  to  us 
with  new  meaning  and  power. 

Our  Father,  who  art  in  heaven — so  the  prayer 
begins.  It  is  the  greatest  word  on  mortal 
tongue,  and  the  truth  of  the  universal  Father- 
hood of  God  is  the  greatest  which  ever  dawned 
on  the  intelligence  of  man.  But  did  it  ever 
dawn  upon  the  intelligence  of  man  in  such  a 
way  as  other  truths  have  done?  When  Peter 
made  his  great  confession,  Thou  art  the  Christ, 
the  Son  of  the  Living  God,  our  Lord  answered 
him  in  joy  and  thankfulness,  Blessed  art  thou, 
Simon,  son  of  Jonah  ;  flesh  and  blood  hath  not  re- 
vealed  it  unto  thee,  but  My  Father  who  is  in 
[14] 


Our  Father^  Who  Art  In  Heaven 

heaven.  May  we  not  say  that  flesh  and  blood 
never  revealed  this  truth  of  God's  eternal  Father- 
hood ?  It  is  God's  own  direct,  supreme  revela- 
tion of  Himself  in  Christ  His  eternal  Son. 

Perhaps  there  never  was  a  false  religion. 
There  have  been  many  imperfect  ones.  And 
that  which  marks  off  the  religion  of  Christ  from 
every  other  is  this  teaching  of  Fatherhood.  It  is 
unique  in  the  history  of  man's  troubled  search 
for  God.  If  we  name  the  least  imperfect  of  the 
ethnic  faiths,  if  we  name  the  highest  of  them,  we 
shall  find  that  Christianity  quite  infinitely  tran- 
scends it,  and  does  so  by  reason  of  its  revelation 
of  God's  Fatherhood.  It  is  the  master-idea  in 
the  religion  of  Christ,  that  which  is  regulative  of 
all  the  rest.  It  is  the  architectonic  thought — 
and  the  whole  plan  of  Christianity  is  the  expres- 
sion of  it. 

This  thought  is  Christ's  own.  It  is  native  and 
original  with  Him.  In  the  world  had  been  noth- 
ing like  it  before.  Max  Muller  assures  us  that 
there  is  no  religion  which  is  sufficiently  recorded 
to  be  understood,  which  does  not  in  some  sense 
or  other  apply  the  term  "  father  "  to  its  deity. 
[■5] 


The  Lord^s  Prayer 

This  may  be  true,  but  it  must  not  mislead  us  as  to 
the  facts.  The  word  is  the  same  but  the  sense 
is  different.  Measureless  distances  lie  between 
the  conceptions  represented  by  this  official  rela- 
tion of  the  god  to  his  worshippers  and  the  true 
Fatherhood  which  Christ  reveals.  Homer  speaks 
of  Zeus  as  the  father  of  gods  and  men.  Aratus, 
in  his  fine  hymn  to  Zeus  quoted  by  the  apostle 
when  "  he  stood  in  the  midst  of  the  Areopagus  " 
at  Athens,  exclaims,  "  Offspring  of  thine  are  we 
too,  we  and  all  that  is  mortal  around  us."  The 
meaning  of  the  term  as  employed  in  pagan  myth 
and  old-world  religion  is  no  more  than  that  God 
is  creator  or  ruler  or  both.  They  did  not  mean 
that  Fatherhood  represented  God's  character  and 
disposition  towards  us — and  that  is  what  Jesus 
meant. 

The  greatest  of  the  Old  Testament  writers 
never  mounted  so  high  as  this  thought  of  our 
Lord.  Though  they  spoke  of  God  as  Father 
they  did  not  know  what  Jesus  knew  and  could 
not  teach  like  Him.  The  relation  was  thought 
of  in  Israel  as  national.     The  people  of  Israel 

collectively  were  as  a  child,  a  son,  of  Jehovah, 
[i6] 


Our  Father^  Who  Art  In  Heaven 


because  specially  called  and  chosen  by  Him  to 
be  His  peculiar  people.  At  other  times,  by 
some  of  the  purest  spirits  of  Israel,  God  is  spoken 
of  as  Father,  in  the  sense  that  obedience  and 
devotion  are  due  to  Him  from  His  worshippers. 
And  only  at  times,  those  times  rare  indeed,  did  a 
spiritual  seer  of  Israel  rise  to  the  majesty  of  an 
intuition  concerning  the  fatherly  character  of 
God.  "  Like  as  a  father  pitieth  his  children," 
sang  one  of  the  Psalmists,  "  so  the  Lord  pitieth 
them  that  fear  Him," — like  as  a  father,  you  ob- 
serve ;  God  is  hke  a  father !  He  did  not  dare  as- 
sert that  God  is  Father !  And  like  as  a  father 
pitieth  his  children,  so  the  Lord  pitieth,  not  all 
His  children,  but  them  that  fear  Him.  But  God 
is  Father,  said  Jesus  ;  and  after  this  manner  pray 
ye,  Our  Father,  who  art  in  heaven. 

The  first  words  of  Jesus  in  His  earthly  life  and 
His  last  breathe  the  Father's  name.  The  child  is 
sought  by  His  parents  and  found  in  the  temple, 
and  He  asks  them.  Wist  ye  not  that  I  must  be  in 
My  Fathers  house  ?  Gethsemane  lies  behind ; 
the  agony  of  Calvary  is  ending ;  and  the  trium- 
phant Sufferer  with  His  last  breath  exclaims, 
[17] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

Father,  into  Thy  hand  I  commend  My  spirit. 
Whenever  the  Saviour  speaks  to  God  He  calls 
Him  Father.  He  never  calls  Him  by  any  other 
name.  Five  prayers  of  His  are  recorded  in  the 
New  Testament.  In  each  one  God  is  addressed 
as  Father  and  in  no  other  way.  In  one  prayer 
which  is  contained  in  three  verses  of  Matthew's 
Gospel,  Father  occurs  five  times.  In  such  terms 
He  would  have  His  disciples  pray. 

Attempts  are  freely  made  to  narrow  the  range 
of  Christ's  great  deliverance.  We  are  asked  to 
believe  that  only  a  favoured  few  are  His  children. 
He  is  not  the  Father  of  mankind,  A  legal  fic- 
tion is  invented,  and  we  are  told  that  through  re- 
pentance and  conversion  a  sinner  may  be  adopted 
into  the  family  of  God.  But  He  is  our  Father 
and  we  are  His  children.  It  is  not  by  our  own 
choice  or  act  that  we  become  members  of  the 
human  family.  It  is  not  by  our  own  choice  or 
act  that  we  become  God's  children.  With  that 
laboured  passion  for  Hmiting  the  beneficence  of 
God  of  which  we  have  often  cause  to  complain, 
the  reactionary,  faced  by  the  unnumbered  sen- 
tences in  which  Christ  speaks  of  God's  Father- 
[i8] 


Our  Fat  her  y  Who  Art  In  Heaven 

hood,  tries  to  explain  that  truly  God  was  the 
Father  of  Jesus,  but  that  Jesus  only  speaks  of 
God  as  "  our  "  Father  or  "  your  "  Father  when 
He  is  speaking  to  His  disciples.  The  forbidding 
soul  asserts  that  Christ  did  not  proclaim  God's 
Fatherhood  to  any  but  the  called  and  chosen, 
the  penitent  and  saved.  This  is  not  true.  It 
falsifies  the  very  letter  of  Scripture.  It  was  to 
the  "  multitude,"  and  not  to  the  disciples,  that 
Jesus  said,  Call  no  man  your  father  on  earth  ;  for 
One  is  your  Father  who  is  in  heaven.  While 
many  times  our  Lord  used  the  word  in  an 
absolute  sense  without  limit  or  restriction — the 
Father,  He  calls  Him,  as  to  the  Samaritan  woman 
by  Jacob's  Well :  The  hour  cometh  and  now  is 
when  the  true  worshipper  shall  worship  the  Father 
in  spirit  and  in  truth.  We  will  set  no  bounds 
about  this  life-giving  affirmation  nor  seek  to  limit 
what  is  infinitely  wide. 

It  is  not  said  that  the  cultured  and  the  rich,  the 
spiritual  and  the  holy,  are  children  of  God. 
Now  are  we,  all  of  us,  God's  children — untrained, 
wayward,  disobedient,  unfilial  children,  but  chil- 
dren still — and  it  doth  not  yet  appear  what  we 
[19] 


The  Lord^s  Prayer 

shall  be  I  Here  is  a  word  for  the  prophets  of  the 
ethnic  faiths,  for  Buddha  and  Zoroaster,  for  Con- 
fucius and  Mohammed  and  for  their  followers  : 
You  are  children  of  God  !  Here  is  a  word  for 
the  heathen  peoples,  lost  in  ignorance  and  night ; 
You  are  children  of  God !  Here  is  the  word 
which  we  are  to  speak  to  the  degraded  and  the 
sinful  amongst  us,  the  word  which  is  to  awaken 
to  life  the  sleeping  glory  of  the  undying  soul : 
You,  bruised  and  wounded  and  defiled,  you  are 
children  of  God !  Here  is  the  word  which  is  to 
carry  us  victorious  through  our  mortal  strife 
with  banners  flying :  Now  are  we  children  of 
God  !  And  this  is  the  word  which  will  greet  our 
ears  when  we  hang  our  battered  armour  on  the 
battlements  of  heaven :  This  is  My  beloved  son. 
Let  us  hold  to  this  great  fact.  It  will  revolution- 
ize our  conceptions  of  God  and  man,  clarify  our 
views  of  duty,  and  inspire  every  one  of  us  with 
the  desire  for  a  noble  life. 

"  Man  never  knows  how  anthropomorphic  he 
may  become."  This  was  the  favourite  sentence 
of  Matthew  Arnold.  To  be  anthropomorphic  is 
to  think  of  Deity  in  the  terms  of  humanity,  to 

[20] 


Our  Fat  her  y  Who  Art  In  Heaven 

speak  of  God  under  figures  which  belong  to  man. 
And  it  is  true.  When  we  try  to  think  of  per- 
sonality we  begin  to  think  of  a  person.  When 
we  try  to  think  of  Power  and  Will  we  begin  to 
think  of  parts  and  passions.  When  we  try  to 
think  of  a  Being  who  thinks  and  loves  we  begin 
to  form  a  mental  picture  of  one  with  a  physical 
appearance  like  our  own  but  greater,  a  glorified, 
non-natural  Man  seated  upon  His  splendid 
throne.  It  is  inevitable.  How  else  are  we, 
within  the  limits  of  human  speech,  to  give  tongue 
to  our  thought  of  Him  ?  And  how  else,  with 
such  faculties  as  ours,  are  we  to  visualize  Him  so 
as  to  feel  Him  real?  Instead  of  complaining 
that  man  never  knows  how  anthropomorphic  he 
may  become,  let  us  say,  Man  never  knows  how 
true  his  anthropomorphism  is  !  He  has  yet  to 
learn  that  the  best  that  he  can  think  of  God  is 
derived  from  what  is  likest  God  within  his  soul. 
Man  is  a  revelation  of  God,  the  true  Shekinah  in 
which  the  glory  of  God  is  manifested  upon  this 
earth. 

The  master-thought  of  a  religion  is  regulative 
of  all  the  rest.    With  it  all  else  must  agree. 

[21] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

The  architect  with  his  plan,  the  dramatist  or 
novelist  with  his  plot,  the  thinker  with  his 
system  of  philosophy,  has  one  central  idea  which 
gives  form  and  life  to  building,  drama,  story,  or 
synthesis.  If  in  any  of  these  there  are  found 
ideas,  purposes,  characters,  deeds — any  form  of 
expression — which  do  not  harmonize  with  the 
primal,  dominating  conception  you  have  a  clear 
case  of  bad  workmanship,  and,  if  the  departure  is 
sufficiently  marked,  the  entire  work  is  spoiled.  In 
contemplation  of  the  religion  proclaimed  by 
Christ  the  thought  of  bad  workmanship  is  ex- 
cluded. We  must  think  of  His  perfect  will  as 
one  with  the  perfect  will  of  God.  He  was  full  of 
grace  and  truth.  Whatever,  therefore,  we  find  in 
our  reading  of  the  religious  life  out  of  harmony 
with  the  controlling  idea  of  the  religion  of  Jesus, 
the  idea  of  the  Fatherhood  of  God,  we  must  re- 
ject as  foreign  to  the  religion  itself.  It  may  be 
that  we  have  misread  the  ancient  documents.  It 
may  be  that  we  have  imported  into  the  faith  of 
Jesus  from  pagan  or  from  worldly  sources  that 
which  Jesus  would  not  own.  It  may  even  be 
that  those  who  were  nearest  to  Him  and  who 

[22] 


Our  Father^  Who  Art  In  Heaven 

have  written  Gospels  and  Epistles  concerning 
Him  were  so  greatly  inferior  to  Him  that  they 
could  not  completely  understand  Him  nor  per- 
fectly report  His  words.  It  is  better  for  us  to 
fall  back  upon  one  or  other  of  these  explanations 
or  upon  one  similar  than  to  think  of  the  faith  of 
Christ  as  a  meaningless  and  muddled  scheme  of 
things,  without  a  plan,  starting  from  no  point 
and  reaching  none.  The  mind  of  Jesus  was 
harmonious  with  itself,  and  if  the  Fatherhood  of 
God  was  the  leading  and  commanding  thought 
in  the  religion  He  taught  every  constituent  ele- 
ment of  that  religion  must  be  controlled  by  it. 
Our  ideas  which  are  inconsistent  with  it  must  be 
modified  accordingly. 

This  will  carry  us  far.  Doctrines,  where  we 
are  in  doubt,  must  be  determined  by  the  fact  of 
Fatherhood.  Doctrines  which  seem  to  conflict 
either  with  our  own  moral  sense  or  with  the 
general  thought  of  religion  must  be  brought  to 
the  bar  of  this  master-truth,  and  if  by  it  they  are 
condemned,  from  such  a  judgment  there  can  be 
no  appeal. 

Thus :  Times  there  have  been  when  the 
[23] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

Church  could  teach  that  God,  acting  solely  upon 
His  own  caprice — it  used  to  be  said  of  His  own 
grace — could  and  did  call  and  predestine  one 
person  to  everlasting  bliss  and  another  to  endless 
woe ;  and  it  was  satirized  by  Burns  in  the  famous 
lines : 

♦*  O  Thou,  wha  in  the  heavens  dost  dwell, 
Wha,  as  it  pleases  best  Thysel', 
Sends  ane  to  heaven  and  ten  to  hell, 

A'  for  Thy  glory. 
And  no  for  onie  guid  or  ill 

They've  done  afore  Thee  !  " 

We  have  only  to  try  that  doctrine,  and  not 
necessarily  a  caricature  of  it,  by  this  test  of 
Fatherhood,  and  it  shrinks  shamefacedly  out  of 
court.  Does  Fatherhood  act  in  fashion  so 
revolting  ?  No.  Then  neither  does  Deity. 
"  But  we  read  it  in  the  Scriptures !  "  Then  you 
must  have  read  the  Scriptures  wrongly.  Which 
is  more  likely,  that  you  should  misunderstand  the 
utterances  of  an  oriental  people  given  to  figure 
of  speech  and  rhetoric  different  from  your  own, 
preserved  through  changes  of  language  and 
intellectual  climate,  through  the  vicissitudes  of 
[24] 


Our  Father y  Who  Art  In  Heaven 


nineteen    hundred    years,    or    that    the    whole 
thought  of  our  Lord  should  be  reduced  to  chaos  ? 
There   have    been   times  when  the  Church 
could  hold   and  teach  that  on  a  sentence  pro- 
nounced at  death  and  irreversible  even  by  the 
great  God  who  had  decreed  it,  man  or  woman  or 
child  would  be  doomed  to  a  never-ending  hell  of 
conscious  torment.    Not  that  only  :  it  was  even 
declared  that  such  a  doom  did  not  follow  simply 
upon  deliberate  guilt.    It  was  the  fate  of  all  of 
Adam's  race,  the  consequence  of  his  transgres- 
sion six  thousand  years  ago,  and  the  doom  was 
just.    And  again  the  answer  is  :    Try  the  doc- 
trine by  this   test  of  Fatherhood.    Man,  take 
your  child  in  your  arms  and  lift  him  above  your 
head  until  the  blood  of  your  warm  heart  flushes 
your  face  with  the  effort  and  the  little  one  sings 
to  the  ceiling  in  his  joy.     Mother,  with  your 
baby  on  your  knees  and  all  heaven  looking  up  at 
you  from  his  eyes,  give  your  imagination  play. 
And  what  do  you  think  of  such  doctrines  now  ? 
If  you  read  of  the  wrath  of  God  you  must  ask 
yourself  what  is  the  pain  and  displeasure  which  a 
noble  father  feels  in  the  presence  of  grievous 
[25] 


The  Ltorcfs  Prayer 

offenses,  what  his  attitude  would  be,  how  he 
would  feel  and  how  he  would  be  likely  to  act, 
utterly  abhorring  the  wrong  and  devotedly  loving 
the  wayward  or  wicked  child — and  you  will  not 
go  far  astray  in  interpreting  the  meaning  of  the 
word.  And  if  you  are  puzzled  by  high-sound- 
ing and  cumbrous  phrases  about  "  faith "  and 
**  works,"  about"  justification  by  faith  "  and  "  con- 
ditions of  sanctification  "  and  the  like  unendur- 
able things,  you  have  but  to  consider  the  terms 
on  which  perfect  and  perfectly  bhssful  relations 
are  possible  between  you  and  your  children — 
love,  trust,  and  simple  goodness — and  you  know 
all  that  all  the  theologies  can  teach  you.  The 
master-thought  of  Christ's  teaching  will  be  your 
tutor  to  bring  you  to  God. 

Let  us  accept  this  truth  as  the  test  by  which 
all  the  moral  problems  of  God's  government  of 
the  world  are  at  last  to  be  resolved.  It  is  futile 
to  deny  that  those  problems  are  many  and  grave. 
Against  them  men  and  women  have  been  bruis- 
ing their  brains  for  twice  two  thousand  years. 
What  we  call  the  problem  of  pain  and  the 
mystery  of  evil  have  plunged  many  minds  into 
[26] 


Our  Father^  Who  Art  In  Heaven 


atheism  and  many  souls  into  despair.  There  is 
no  reason  for  the  atheism  and  no  cause  for  the 
despair.  There  are  explanations  of  many  of  the 
puzzles  which  have  been  thought  most  baffling, 
explanations  which  call  for  thought  and  care  and 
skill  but  which  are  yet  capable  of  being  grasped 
by  ordinary  intellects  when  the  clue  has  been 
supplied.  Yet  for  many  the  puzzle  and  the 
bafflement  remain,  and  the  minds  of  men  will 
continue  to  ask.  How  can  these  things  be  under 
the  rule  of  an  all-powerful,  all-wise,  and  all-loving 
God? 

The  perplexity  becomes  dumb  inarticulate  pain 
when  we  ourselves  are  the  victims  of  what  seems 
to  us  the  injustice  of  Ufe.  "  This  is  my  com- 
plaint," said  the  Psalmist,  "  that  the  hand  of  the 
Lord  doth  change  "—is  not  equal,  that  is  to  say, 
is  not  impartial,  infallibly  just.  And  this  is  often 
our  complaint:  sickness,  affliction,  disappoint- 
ment, defeat,  death,  they  come  without  reason, 
undeserved,  unprovoked,  and  who  can  help  but 
murmur  at  his  fate  ?  If  only  we  could  be  per- 
suaded to  set  every  universal  moral  problem  and 
every  personal  pain  and  sorrow  in  the  light  of 
[27] 


The  Tuorcfs  Prayer 


this  thought  of  the  Fatherhood  of  God.  Let  us 
admit  for  the  moment  that  the  "why"  and 
"  wherefore  "  of  it  are  beyond  finding  out.  Let 
us  admit  that  the  way  is  dark  and  that  no  ray  of 
light  from  reason  falls  upon  our  troubled  path. 
Let  us  admit  that  it  is  at  present  beyond,  hope- 
lessly beyond,  the  capacity  of  mortal  to  discern 
good  reason  for  our  suffering — and  even  then  let 
us  try  to  believe  that  the  word  Father  describes 
God's  essential,  indestructible  character  and  His 
unbroken,  unchanging  attitude  to  us.  There 
must  be  a  reason  for  it  all.  Sorrow  cometh  not 
from  the  ground.  He  doth  not  afflict  wiUingly 
nor  grieve  the  children  of  men.  Though  He 
cause  pain  yet  will  He  have  mercy  upon  us  ac- 
cording to  the  multitude  of  His  compassions. 
Though  for  a  moment  He  hide  His  face  from  us, 
yet  with  everlasting  kindness  will  He  hold  us  in 
His  remembrance.  Though  weeping  comes,  he 
comes  only  as  a  traveller  to  lodge  at  night :  joy 
cometh  to  dwell  in  the  morning.  If  you  know 
the  meaning  of  fatherhood,  and  if  you  know 
your  own  heart  towards  your  child,  you  know 
the    thoughts    that    God    thinks   towards  you, 

[28] 


Our  Father.j  IVho  Art  In  Heaven 

thoughts  of  good  and  not  of  evil,  and  you  may 
yet  attain  unto  that  cheerful  faith  to  which  at  the 
last  come  the  rhapsodies  of  saints  and  the  visions 
of  sages,  Your  Father  knoweth. 

Well,  now,  let  us  see  how  this  truth  if  it  once 
grips  us,  and  if  we  understand  that  it  is  and  must 
be  determinative  of  all  our  theories  of  life,  will 
affect  our  views  of  human  relations. 

God  is  the  Father  of  us  all.  He  is  our  Father. 
He  cares  for  us.  But  He  is  no  more  our  Father 
than  He  is  the  Father  of  our  friend  or  our  foe. 
He  cares  not  any  more  for  us  than  for  His  children 
of  other  name  and  race.  He  is  the  Father  of  all 
His  children,  and  all  are  the  children  of  His  love. 
He  has  made  of  one  blood  all  races  of  mankind 
to  dwell  together  and  to  seek  after  Him,  though 
indeed  He  is  not  very  far  from  any  one  of  us  ! 
Do  you  believe  any  part  of  this  ?  Should  you 
believe  it  if  you  made  a  trip  to  Chinatown? 
Should  you  believe  it  somewhere  in  the  Black 
Belt  ?  "  The  only  good  Indian  is  a  dead  In- 
dian " — how  often  have  you  said  that  ?  And 
one  does  not  dare  ask  an  Englishman  who  has 
been  \vi  the  Far  East  how  often  he  has  referred 
[29] 


The  Lord's    Prayer 

to  a  cultivated  person  of  another  race  as  a 
"nigger"  with  an  offensive  adjective  to  describe 
him !  A  few  grains  of  pigment  more  or 
less  showing  in  the  white  of  the  eye  or  in  the 
finger  nails — and  where  is  our  doctrine  of  the 
Fatherhood  of  God  and  the  Brotherhood  of 
Man  ?  Contempt  of  colour  is  blasphemy  against 
God — let  us  be  sure  of  that.  And  when  the 
practical  difficulty  presents  itself,  the  problem  of 
statesmanship,  of  law,  or  of  citizenship,  let  us 
bear  in  mind  that  we  are  not  left  in  a  wild  welter 
of  a  world  without  guidance  or  definitive  rule. 
We  have  to  set  the  problem  in  the  light  of 
Christ's  teaching  of  God's  Fatherhood,  and  see  if 
it  becomes  simpler  then  ! 

The  South  often  tells  us  that  we  do  not  under- 
stand the  Negro  question.  The  South  says  this 
to  the  intelligent  people  of  the  North,  and,  of 
course,  much  more  vigorously  and  with  better 
ground  of  reason  to  men  of  British  blood.  It 
may  be  true.  Perhaps  the  North  does  not 
understand  the  Negro  problem.  Is  it  certain 
that  the  South  does  ?  Let  us  take  the  Southern 
ground :  "  The  North  does  not  understand  the 
[30] 


Our  Father.^  Who  Art  In  Heaven 

Negro  question,"  and  then  ask,  "  Should  we  not 
both  come  nearer  to  understanding  if  we  started 
where  Jesus  Christ  starts,  with  the  postulate  that 
God  is  our  Father  and  that  we  all  are  brethren  ?  " 

The  cynic  will  tell  us  that  the  theory  does  not 
work  out  right  in  practice.  Has  it  been  tried  ? 
He  will  say  that  the  "  Am  I  not  a  man  and  a 
brother  "  business  has  been  worked  to  death.  But 
are  the  cynic's  code  of  law  and  system  of  morals 
your  own  ?  For  if  the  mind  that  was  in  Jesus  be 
not  in  you,  how  are  you  one  of  His  ? 

It  is  not  pretended  that  the  recognition  of 
God's  Fatherhood  will  end  every  difficulty.  It 
is  not  suggested  that  you  can'stop  there.  This 
is  only  a  plea  that  you  will  begin  there  !  Let  us 
admit  that  these  others  are,  equally  with  our- 
selves, God's  children,  and  so  our  brothers  and 
our  sisters.  That  is  not  to  say  that  they  may  not 
still  have  to  be  regarded  as  children  whose 
education  has  been  neglected  and  who  have  suf- 
fered a  thousand  disadvantages  of  race  and  station. 
They  may  not  know  as  well  how  to  behave 
themselves  in  their  Father's  house.  They  may 
not  have  reached  a  stage  of  self-conscious  devel- 
[31] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

opment  in  which  they  can  be  entrusted  with  all  the 
privileges  which  belong  to  those  who  have  longer 
seen  the  light  of  day.  It  does  not  follow  that 
because  such  a  one  is  your  brother  that  you  must 
entrust  to  him  all  the  powers  which  you  are 
called  upon  to  wield.  Perhaps,  just  because  he 
is  your  brother,  you  will  be  affectionately  anxious 
not  to  put  that  in  his  hands  with  which  he  may 
hurt  himself  and  other  people.  That  may  be 
good  for  the  son  just  graduated  from  the  univer- 
sity which  would  not  be  good  for  the  child  enter- 
ing the  kindergarten.  But  the  point  is  that  if  the 
Negro  or  the  Chinaman  or  the  ignorant  immigrant 
or  the  representative  of  any  backward  race  is  in- 
deed your  brother,  then  the  spirit  with  which  you 
will  treat  him  will  be  a  brotherly  spirit.  It  will 
not  be  one  of  contempt.  It  will  not  be  one  of  hos- 
tility. It  will  not  be  a  spirit  of  supercilious  dis- 
dain. It  will  be  the  kind,  considerate,  anxious, 
yearning  spirit  of  one  who  desires  to  see  the 
Father's  children  rise  to  the  level  of  their  birth- 
right and  the  possibilities  of  their  destiny.  Is 
this  plain  ?  One  of  the  great  men  of  this  coun- 
try, when  asked  if  he  regarded  the  Negro 
[32] 


Our  Fat  her  y  Who  Art  In  Heaven 

problem  as  insoluble,  replied :  "  You  must  re- 
member they  are  American  citizens."  And  in 
the  presence  of  the  open  Bible  and  in  the 
realized  presence  of  Christ,  must  we  not  say  of 
this  same  problem  and  of  the  same  people  :  You 
must  remember  that  they,  like  you,  are  the  chil- 
dren of  God  ? 

Now  consider  how  this  truth  of  God's  Father- 
hood will  affect  some  other  views  of  ours.  God 
is  the  Father  of  all  virtuous  and  lovely  souls. 
He  is  equally  the  Father  of  the  sinful  and  the 
vicious.  He  was  the  Father  of  the  exemplary, 
dutiful,  industrious  son  who  stayed  at  home  and 
worked.  He  was  not  less  the  Father  of  the 
prodigal  who  wandered  into  a  far  country,  spent 
his  substance  in  riotous  living,  and  began  to  be 
in  want.  "  If  you  are  not  good  God  will  not 
love  you,"  a  parent  sometimes  says  to  a  child. 
But  He  will !  He  cannot  help  it.  You  do  not 
cease  to  love  your  little  one  because  of  his  mis- 
takes and  shortcomings.  You  smile  and  are 
sorry  together !  But  the  love  is  there.  God 
may  have  to  punish — but  that  need  not  be  un- 
loving. His  strokes  may  be  mercy.  His  chastise- 
[333 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

ment  grace.  He  cannot  possibly  treat  all  alike, 
the  dutiful  and  the  undutiful,  the  filial  and  the 
rebellious.  He  may  have  to  leave  the  unfilial 
and  undutiful  alone,  to  taste  of  the  fruit  of  his 
going,  and  see  what  results  from  his  sin.  In  a 
word,  God  may  have  to  deal  with  a  sinning  child 
of  His  as  the  noblest  and  purest  earthly  parent 
might  with  his  prodigal  son  or  daughter  who 
would  not  come  home.  Yet  God  is  still  the 
Father,  and  God  is  love. 

For  this  fact  of  Fatherhood  is  indestructible. 
On  that  we  must  insist.  In  the  nature  of  the 
case  it  is  indestructible.  Fatherhood  is  not  a 
contract.  It  is  one  of  the  inevitabilities  of  life. 
If  I  am  already,  here  and  now,  your  son,  how 
can  you  make  it  otherwise  ?  I  may  be  unworthy 
of  you.  You  may  desire  to  disown  me.  But 
the  fact  of  your  fatherhood  is  one  of  the  facts  of 
the  universe.  And  to  many  of  us  it  is  incon- 
ceivable that  God  should  ever  want  to  destroy 
such  a  fact.  Suppose  your  son  is  so  unworthy, 
and  you  so  righteously  grieved  and  pained  and 
angry  with  him.  Suppose  he  came  to  himself, 
with  tears  and  shame  and  through  a  cleansing 
[34] 


Our  Father^  Who  Art  In  Heaven 

baptism  of  repentance  sought  his  way  back  to 
your  heart.  Suppose  you,  with  divine  insight, 
saw  that  his  repentance  was  sincere  and  that  he 
longed  with  a  great  longing  for  your  moral  help 
and  uplift  in  his  toilsome,  agonizing  struggle 
backward  to  the  forgotten  good  and  forward  to 
the  light  of  day.  It  is  only  barely  conceivable 
that  you  would  turn  a  deaf  ear  to  all  his  petitions 
and  prayers.  And  if  you  did,  if  you  could  still 
remain  obdurate,  angry,  whatever  good  cause  for 
anger  he  had  given  you  in  his  years  of  sin,  one 
can  only  say  that  you  would  fail  to  realize  the 
noblest  type  of  forgiving  love.  But  when  it  is  a 
question  of  God's  love  and  of  His  eternal  Father, 
hood,  it  is  for  ever  and  for  ever  impossible  to 
conceive  of  a  time  when,  if  the  prodigal 
wishes  to  return  to  his  Father,  the  Father  will  re- 
fuse to  receive  him.  We  may  trust  death  and  if 
need  be  hell  itself  to  demonstrate  the  Father's 
love. 

Then  what  shall  we  say  to  the  undutiful  and 

the  sinful  ?     What  is  that  but  to  ask.  What  shall 

we  say  to  ourselves  ?     Have  we  not  all  sinned 

and  come  short  of  the  privilege  of  sonship  and 

[35] 


The  Lord*s  Prayer 

daughterhood  ?  But  is  there  that  to  arouse  the 
conscience  more  vital  and  piercing  than  this  re- 
proach :  You  are  sinning  against  God's  everlast- 
ing love :  you  are  wounding  the  Father's  heart  ? 
And  where  shall  we  find  such  a  matchless  plea 
and  mighty  inspiration :  You  are  God's  chil- 
dren :  God  loves  you :  God,  your  Father, 
desires  His  children  to  be  worthy  of  their  parent- 
age and  like  Himself !  Goodness  is  natural  to  us 
since  we  are  the  Father's  children,  and  we  must 
follow  the  strain  in  our  blood  and  our  spirit's 
predestined  aim.  Now,  if  we  have  reason  to  feel 
our  shortcomings,  our  incompleteness,  our  sins, 
let  us  seek  once  more  power  from  on  high  that 
we  may  be  the  dutiful,  loving  children  we  ought 
to  be.  Let  us  turn  away  from  self-seeking,  pas- 
sion, or  the  mere  emptiness  and  frivolity  of  life, 
and  walk  in  the  dignity  of  the  children  of  God, 
breathing  only  as  prayer  and  as  vow  of  consecra- 
tion the  word  which  Jesus  taught :    Our  Father, 


[36] 


II 

Hallowed  Be  Thy  Name 


A  Creed  is  a  rod, 
And  a  crown  is  of  night ; 
But  this  thing  is  of  God, 
To  be  man  with  thy  might, 

To  grow  straight  in  the  strength  of  thy  spirit,  and 
live  out  thy  life  as  the  light. 

—Swinburne, 


II 

HALLOWED  BE  THY  NAME 

THE  first  and  most  obvious  reflection 
is  that  we  ought  to  guard  against  any 
tendency  to  drift  into  a  flippant  use  of 
the  name  of  God.  Irreverence,  we  may  admit, 
is  of  the  heart  and  not  of  the  hps  ;  and  Carlyle  is 
probably  right  when  he  speaks  of  people  who 
only  swear  from  the  teeth  outwards.  Yet  it  is 
eminently  desirable  that  those  who  in  solemn 
gladness  have  professed  themselves  the  followers 
of  Christ  should  refrain  from  any  use  of  the 
divine  names  inconsistent  with  the  profound 
reverence  of  the  heart.  It  is  easy  to  argue  that 
the  Jew  carried  his  veneration  of  the  sacred  name 
too  far,  and  made  a  fetich  of  it.  The  time  came 
when  he  would  not  so  much  as  speak  the  name 
of  God — the  personal,  covenant  name  of  Yahwey. 
So  he  substituted  for  it  the  lower  word,  Adonai, 
Lord.  Later,  the  name  was  written  with  the 
consonants  of  the  word  Yahwey  and  the  vowels 
[39] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

of  the  word  Adonai.  And  some  time  very  late 
in  history,  probably  about  the  time  of  the  Prot- 
estant Reformation  in  Europe,  the  ^oxA  Jehovah 
was  evolved  from  this  hybrid  spelling.  The  his- 
tory is  curious,  and  if  it  brings  singular  sugges- 
tions to  those  who  have  learned  to  love  the 
modern,  manufactured  word  Jehovah,  it  should 
also  force  upon  our  minds  the  conviction  that 
such  reverence,  exaggerated  as  it  was,  rebukes 
the  levity  with  which  at  times  we  permit  our- 
selves to  toss  to  and  fro  the  name  or  names  of 
Deity.  "  Od's  blood "  is  an  old  English  ex- 
clamation which  you  must  have  seen  many  times 
in  historic  fiction  ;  "  zounds  "  is  still  better  known. 
"  Od's  blood  "  is  a  corruption  of  "  God's  blood  " 
and  "  zounds  "  of  "  God's  wounds."  And  if  these 
phrases  are  no  longer  on  our  lips,  others  are 
which,  while  often  meaningless,  are  out  of  place 
in  Christian  speech.  If  they  do  not  betray  a  real 
and  recognized  irreverence,  they  manifest  at  least 
a  want  of  thoughtful  and  purposed  reverence. 
They  do  not  reflect  the  spirit  of  our  prayer: 
*'  Hallowed  be  Thy  name." 

But  this  does  not  carry  us  very  far.    What  do 
[40] 


Hallowed  Be  Thy  Name 

we  mean  by  the  prayer,  Hallowed  be  Thy  name  ? 
Nay,  it  would  be  safer  to  ask,  "  Do  we  mean 
anything  at  all  ? "  For  it  is  probable  that  the 
phrase  is  only  a  phrase  to  us,  and  that  beyond  the 
obvious  reflection  with  which  we  have  just 
started  out  we  find  little  instruction,  edification, 
or  inspiration  in  the  prayer  we  pray  so  easily. 

With  us,  in  our  ordinary  life,  names  are  noth- 
ing worth.  They  are  a  mere  social  convenience. 
In  civilized  Hfe  we  are  bound  to  wear  a  mark  of 
identification  of  some  kind.  Even  in  a  great 
convict  establishment,  where  only  figures  distin- 
guish one  prisoner  from  another,  the  unhappy 
man  finds  an  added  humiliation  in  being  reduced 
from  a  name  to  a  number.  There  is  some 
warmth  and  colour  in  our  own  names,  and  they 
add  a  little  picturesqueness  to  social  life.  There 
is  even  much  history  in  them,  though  of  this  we 
seldom  think.  Many  of  them  are  red-veined 
with  the  life  of  the  centuries,  and  rich  with  quaint 
or  hallowed  memories.  But  all  the  same,  they 
have  no  essential  meaning  for  us.  They  do  not 
describe  the  person  whom  they  indicate.  They 
tell  nothing  of  his  character  and  power.  They 
[41] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

do  not  stand  for  personality.  A  man  may  be 
called  Hunter  though  he  has  never  seen  an  animal 
wilder  than  those  in  the  park  nor  looked  at  a  gun 
except  in  the  museum.  He  may  be  called  Baker 
though  he  knows  nothing  of  bread  except  that 
he  eats  it.  Mary,  notwithstanding  her  Hebrew 
name,  is  not  always  bitter,  and  John  is  some- 
times quite  other  than  a  visible  embodiment  of 
the  grace  of  God. 

Not  so  with  the  Hebrew  treatment  of  names 
and  with  the  usages  of  yet  more  primitive  peo- 
ples. There  exist  traces  of  an  ancient  and  wide- 
spread superstition  that  one  who  knew  the  name 
of  another  possessed  some  kind  of  power  over 
him.  Hence  the  reluctance  to  tell  the  name  ex- 
cept to  those  whose  good  faith  was  assured.  Be- 
tween the  name  and  the  personality  a  close  con- 
nection was  supposed  to  exist.  The  name  al- 
most possessed  an  entity  of  its  own.  It  was,  if 
not  a  living  thing,  at  least  an  essential  part  of  the 
personality.  A  name  stood,  in  Old  Testament 
life,  for  the  sum  total  of  the  characteristics  and 
attributes  of  the  person  who  bore  it  Abraham 
is  the  "  friend  of  God  "  and  Jacob  is  "  the  sup- 
[42] 


Hallowed  Be   Thy  Name 

planter."  While  the  word  used  in  an  absolute 
sense — "the  name  of" — means  nothing  less  than 
the  all  of  which  we  think  when  the  person  is 
named.  The  divine  names  were  thus  invested 
with  a  pecuhar  sacredness.  And  the  phrase  "  the 
name  of  God  "  is  frequently  employed  to  mean 
the  majesty,  the  authority,  the  personality,  and 
the  revealed  character  of  God, 

Illustrations  of  this  from  the  Old  Testament 
will  readily  occur  to  you.  We  read  in  Proverbs, 
"  The  name  of  the  Lord  is  a  strong  tower  :  the 
righteous  runneth  into  it  and  are  safe."  Now 
what  are  you  to  make  of  such  imagery  ?  How 
can  a  name  be  a  tower  ?  How  can  you  run  into 
it  ?  And  how  can  you  be  safe  there  ?  We  do 
not  suppose  that  the  person  of  spiritual  vision 
who  shaped  this  proverb  for  us  imagined  that  in 
the  consonants  and  vowels  which  formed  the 
name-words,  some  thaumaturgic,  wonder-working 
power  was  to  be  found !  Is  it  a  mixed  metaphor  ? 
How,  we  ask  again,  can  a  name  be  a  Tower  of 
Refuge?  Quite  easily  and  certainly,  as  all  the 
ages  tell,  if  you  see  that  by  "  the  name  of  God  " 
the  Hebrew  meant  God  Himself.  In  the  power, 
[43] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

the  holiness,  and  the  love  of  God  the  man  who 
reverently  seeks  it  finds  protection  and  rest. 

In  like  manner  the  prophet  Zechariah  promises 
that  they  who  will  trust  in  the  Lord  and  do  right 
shall  be  strengthened  in  the  Lord  and  shall  walk 
up  and  down  in  His  name.  You  do  not  need  to 
ask,  How  can  a  human  being  walk  up  and  down 
in  a  name?  You  have  seen  enough  of  the 
Biblical  manner  of  expression  to  understand  that 
security  is  to  be  enjoyed  by  those  who  will  place 
their  reliance  in  the  strength  and  goodness  of 
God. 

In  this  way  our  Lord  speaks  of  "  the  name  of 
God "  here  and  elsewhere.  When  He  says, 
/  have  manifested  Thy  name  unto  the  men  whom 
Thou  gavest  Me  ;  I  have  declared  unto  them  Thy 
name.  He  asserts  that  He  has  made  known  the 
unique,  life-giving  revelation  of  the  Father's  will 
and  the  Father's  love  which  He  lived  and  died 
to  give  us.  He  has  shown  what  God  is  and 
what  is  His  attitude  to  us.  When  He  prays, 
Father,  glorify  Thy  name,  He  is  asking  that  the 
attributes  of  holiness  and  love  which  He  has  re- 
vealed as  characteristic  of  His  Father  and  ours 
[44] 


Hallowed  Be   Thy  Name 

should  be  recognized  and  honoured  throughout 
all  the  world  and  all  the  ages,  and  that  the 
human  race  should  be  won  to  worship  and  glad 
obedience.  And  when  He  prays  and  teaches  us 
to  pray,  Hallowed  be  Thy  name,  He  desires  and 
He  wishes  us  to  desire  that  the  divine  quality  of 
Fatherhood  which  He  has  just  made  the  initial 
and  determinative  idea  of  the  prayer  may  indeed 
be  "  hallowed."  May  the  Father-God  of  whom 
Jesus  spoke  become  the  one  object  of  worship 
amongst  all  mankind !  And  may  we  His  wor- 
shippers conserve  and  sanctify  that  revelation  of 
His  character !  Our  Father,  hallowed  be  Thy 
name — the  name  and  the  fact  of  Fatherhood  ! 

Let  us  see  what  is  involved  in  this  prayer. 

There  is  something  very  wonderful  in  the  pro- 
found reverence  which  distinguishes  the  man  of 
science.  For  many  of  us  there  is  rebuke  in  it. 
We  measure  ourselves  against  him  and  stand 
condemned.  There  is  a  nobihty  in  the  scientific 
spirit  before  which  we  bow.  There  is  inspiration 
in  the  contemplation  of  the  motive-passion  by 
which  the  high  priests  of  science  have  been 
urged  to  their  work  and  sustained  in  it.  Their 
[45] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

sense  of  awe  moves  us  profoundly.  This  is  true 
not  only  of  those  who  have  consciously  avowed 
themselves  religious.  Their  devotion  is  beauti- 
ful and  illuminating.  "  O  God,  I  am  thinking 
Thy  thoughts  after  Thee,"  exclaimed  Kepler  in 
his  joy,  as  his  telescope  swept  the  heavens.  "  I 
bowed  my  head  and  worshipped,"  said  Linnaeus, 
as  he  bent  over  his  flower, "  I  saw  God  in  His 
glory  pass  by."  "  Science,"  says  Lord  Kelvin, 
•'  positively  affirms  creating  and  directing  power, 
which  it  compels  us  to  accept  as  an  article  of  be- 
Hef."  Yet  these  are  not  the  only  manifestations 
of  devoutness.  We  look  at  the  work  of  the 
nature-searcher  who  has  never  thought  of  him- 
self as  a  follower  of  Christ  and  who  might  be 
ready  to  deny  that  he  should  be  called  a  Chris- 
tian at  all.  We  think  of  his  lifelong  devotion  to 
fact  and  his  indescribable  adoration  of  truth. 
He  will  not  falsify  the  record  for  a  house  full  of 
silver  and  gold.  He  is  sworn  interpreter  in  the 
High  Court  of  Nature,  and  he  will  see  the 
heavens  fall  and  this  sohd  earth  go  reeling  back 
to  chaos  before  he  will  overstate  or  understate 
or  wrongly  state  the  evidence  which  the  micro- 
[46] 


Hallowed  Be   Thy  Name 

scope  or  the  test  tube  has  submitted  to  him. 
Why  should  he  be  so  precise  in  evaluation  of 
each  petty  incident  of  analysis  or  so  laborious 
and  so  tremblingly  modest  in  the  elaboration  of 
his  synthesis  ?  What  is  fact,  after  all  ?  As  Pilate 
asked  in  his  world- worn  heart,  "  What  is  truth  ?  " 
And  why  should  the  man  of  science  be  so 
guarded  in  his  answer  ?  It  is  splendid,  and  we 
who  are  worshippers  of  the  God  of  truth  ought 
to  recognize  with  deep  thanksgiving  the  rever- 
ence of  the  scientific  mind. 

Now,  there  is  something  in  this  to  suggest  to 
us  a  reverence  for  the  name  of  God  which  will 
make  better  and  braver  men  and  women  of  us. 
If  the  man  of  science  feels  this  awe  in  the  pres- 
ence of  an  ascertained  fact,  and  if  he  feels  that  he 
is  coerced  by  an  abstract  something  which  for 
want  of  a  better  word  he  calls  Truth,  so  that  he 
cannot — not  merely  will  not — make  his  judgment 
blind — how  much  more  shall  we  profoundly' 
venerate  the  revelation  of  God  made  to  our 
hearts  by  Jesus  Christ !  With  what  immovable 
fidelity  shall  we  pursue  to  its  remotest  implica- 
tion the  doctrine  of  God's  Fatherhood  which 
[47] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

Jesus  taught!  With  what  reverence  will  we 
safeguard  the  doctrine  itself  from  attack;  with 
what  courage  and  devotion  will  we  labour  to 
secure  its  adoption  as  a  working  principle  of  life 
over  all  the  earth  ! 

That  which  we  eloquently  expound  as  doctrine 
we  will  valiantly  defend  as  fact !  If  God  is  our 
Father,  and  we  all  are  brethren,  then  in  the  great 
crises  of  the  nations  and  in  the  routine  of  our 
days  we  will  abide  by  no  lower  standard  of  life. 
Nothing  will  ever  extenuate  the  guilt  of  the 
Church  in  its  servile  acquiescence  in  war  and  its 
yet  more  ungodly  glorification  of  the  war-spirit. 
It  is  not  the  fighter  who  stands  condemned  be- 
yond all  others ;  it  is  the  professed  followers  of 
Him  they  called  the  Prince  of  Peace  who  kept 
themselves  safe  and  clamoured  for  war.  In  a 
famous  speech  defending  the  American  Colonies 
in  the  War  of  Independence,  Edmund  Burke  ex- 
claimed : 

"  The  poorest  being  that  crawls  on  earth,  con- 
tending to  save  itself  from  injustice,  is  an  object 
respectable  in  the  eyes  of  God  and  man.  But  I 
cannot  conceive  any  existence  under  heaven  that 
[48] 


Hallowed  Be   Thy  Name 

is  more  truly  odious  and  disgusting  than  an  im- 
potent, helpless  creature,  without  civil  wisdom  or 
military  skill,  bloated  with  pride  and  arrogance, 
caUing  for  battles  which  he  is  not  to  fight,  and 
contending  for  a  violent  dominion  which  he  can 
never  exercise." 

And  in  war  time  such  spectacles,  "  odious  and 
disgusting,"  in  Burke's  strong  phrase,  are  pre- 
sented to  us  from  day  to  day  that  the  words  of  a 
British  preacher  known  on  both  sides  of  the 
Atlantic  remain  unexaggerated  truth : 

"  That  which  breaks  the  heart  of  the  peace 
angel  is  not  so  much  the  corporal  undoing  of  the 
stricken  field  as  the  brutality  of  the  man  in  the 
street,  the  cowardly  swagger  of  the  music  hall, 
the  degradation  of  the  pulpit  to  the  service  of  a 
heathen  deity,  the  blood-lust  fostered  by  theatres, 
inculcated  in  schools,  preached  in  churches,  prop- 
agated by  our  women,  professed  by  our  chil- 
dren, practiced  by  all." 

This  is  no  time  of  war.  If  it  were  you  your- 
selves might  begin  to  denounce  the  preaching  of 
peace  as  cowardly,  criminal,  and  unpatriotic.  In 
reason  and  quietness  you  are  ready  to  confess 
[49] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

that  nothing  less  is  consistent  with  our  doctrines 
of  the  Fatherhood  of  God  and  the  Brotherhood 
of  Man. 

Then  let  us  call  our  social  sins  into  the  light  of 
day  and  condemn  them  in  our  own  personal 
practice  and  in  the  civilization  of  which  we  form 
a  part.  You  shall  not  glory  in  a  social  order  in 
which  the  race  is  to  the  swift  and  the  battle  to 
the  strong ;  in  which  men  fight  for  their  own 
hand  without  ruth  or  pity,  reckless  of  the  cries 
of  the  wounded  and  the  groans  of  the  dying, 
marching  to  their  desired  goal  over  the  prostrate 
bodies  of  friends  betrayed  and  rivals  trampled 
down.  You  shall  not  selfishly  seek  your  own, 
work  for  your  own,  fight  for  your  own,  claim 
your  own  and  enjoy  it,  while  men  and  women 
for  whom  Christ  died  are  trodden  down  into  the 
ooze  and  mire  of  the  streets  and  their  children 
are  eaten  as  though  they  were  bread.  You 
shall  not  take  your  ease  and  be  happy  while  pre- 
ventable disease  is  not  prevented,  while  igno- 
rance takes  its  daily  toll  of  human  life,  while  the 
saloon  and  the  race-track  poison  the  hfe-blood  of 
the  community,  and  greed  and  rapacity,  con- 
[SO] 


Hallowed  Be   Thy  Name 

trolling  the  machinery  of  political  life,  corrupt 
the  very  sources  of  national  well-being.  These 
things  you  shall  not  do  nor  suffer  to  be  done,  be- 
cause they  are  a  repudiation  of  the  divine  Father- 
hood and  a  denial  of  human  brotherhood.  And 
as  is  the  man  of  science  with  his  profound  and 
awful  reverence  for  fact  and  the  truth  of  things, 
so  shall  you  be  with  the  sensitive  chivalry  which 
feels  a  stain  upon  your  knightly  honour  as  though 
it  were  a  raw  and  gaping  wound.  You  shall  not 
be  able  to  bear  the  thought  that  such  things  as 
these  are  done  to  and  by  your  Father's  children 
in  any  corner  of  your  Father's  world.  At  home, 
in  your  city  streets,  in  the  halls  of  justice  and 
legislation,  in  your  schools,  factories,  exchanges, 
banks,  and  in  the  daily  toil  by  which  you  live, 
you  shall  wrong  no  member  of  the  great  brother- 
hood of  humanity  nor  see  him  wronged,  and  you 
shall  order  your  public  and  your  private  life  by 
the  royal  law  of  love.  And  where  you  cannot 
be  in  person,  where  you  think  you  cannot  be  in 
effective  influence,  where  torture  is  endured  to 
agony  and  blood  flows  in  rivers  in  the  Ghettos  of 
Russian  cities,  amongst  the  cocoa  slaves  under 
[51] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

the  burning  blue  of  the  equator,  the  rubber 
victims  in  the  sinister  forests  of  the  Upper  Congo, 
and  in  the  dark  places  of  the  earth  where  the  cry 
of  helpless  humanity  is  never  silent,  there  shall 
you  be  in  sympathy  and  spirit,  in  the  measureless 
potentiality  of  your  prayers,  and  the  undreamed-of 
power  of  your  compassionate  love.  Give  none  of 
this,  and  your  prayer,  Hallowed  be  Thy  7iame, 
becomes  a  hollow  mockery.  Give  all  of  this  to 
which  the  soul  can  reach,  and  your  all-embracing 
prayer  becomes  a  prophecy  of  dawn :  Our 
Father,  who  art  in  heaven.  Hallowed  be  Thy 
name  ! 

There  are  two  ways  in  which  we  can  help  to 
answer  our  own  prayer  and  hallow  the  name  of 
God. 

One  is  the  acceptance  of  those  deep  and 
tender  views  of  the  character  of  God  which  are 
sometimes  condemned  as  a  modern  Gospel  which 
is  not  a  Gospel,  but  which  are  really  intrinsic  and 
essential  in  the  mind  of  Christ.  And  if  we  do 
accept  them,  it  must  be  frankly  and  with  glad- 
ness. Of  the  modern  critical  study  of  the  Bible, 
Dr.  William  Newton  Clarke,  the  most  distin- 
[52] 


Hallowed  Be   Thy  Name 

guished  theologian  on  this  continent,  a  man  who 
has  wedded  the  broadest  thought  to  the  most 
beautiful  piety,  has  just  written  : 

"  Certain  general  large  results,  and  many  more 
special  ones  may  fairly  be  said  to  have  been  es- 
tablished to  remain.  At  the  present  day,  there- 
fore, it  is  both  my  duty  and  my  privilege  to  ac- 
cept such  conclusions.  I  shall  be  wilfully  mis- 
taken if  I  refuse.  And  if  I  accept  them  I  am 
not  to  accept  them  on  the  sly  and  shamefacedly, 
but  freely  and  frankly,  like  an  honest  man ;  and 
when  they  have  been  accepted  I  am  not  to  lay 
them  on  the  shelf,  as  if  by  mere  mental  assent  I 
had  fulfilled  my  duty  to  them.  I  must  live  up 
to  my  acceptance.  I  must  take  them  into  daily 
use  in  my  own  understanding  and  presentation 
of  the  Bible.  I  must  manfully  move  with  the 
movement  of  truth.  I  have  sympathy  with  the 
man  who  said,  *  If  it  is  heresy  to  think  ahead  of 
one's  time,  is  it  not  heresy  to  think  behind  one's 
time  ? ' " 

It  should  be  the  ambition  of  the  Church  of  our 
day  to  maintain  a  pulpit  which  is  never  once 
guilty  of  the  heresy  of  thinking  behind  the  time. 
[53] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

The  minister  of  Christ  must  refuse  to  beheve  that 
God  is  a  God  of  the  Dead.  He  must  proclaim 
the  Uving  truths  which  he  has  learned  from  a  Liv- 
ing God.  President  Faunce,  in  his  noble  volume, 
"  The  Educational  Ideal  in  the  Ministry,"  refers 
to  Kipling's  story  entitled  "  The  Man  Who  Was," 
and  declares  that  there  are  "  sincerely  devout 
men  who  seem  to  believe  in  a  God  who  was  ! " 
And  he  exclaims  with  indignation :  "  Such  an 
idea  is  the  master-falsehood  of  humanity.  It  is 
the  one  fundamental  untruth  which  will  put  un- 
reality into  every  sermon  and  impiety  into  every 
prayer.  Our  God  was  and  is  and  is  to  come  ! " 
Let  the  men  and  women  whose  ears  are  open  to 
His  speech  glory  in  sustaining  in  every  city  of 
our  land  a  Church  of  commanding  name  and 
position  to  which  devout  persons  of  every  name 
and  denomination  and  creed  may  come  with  the 
certainty  that  they  will  hear  preached,  with  what- 
soever of  human  infirmity  and  incompleteness,  a 
theology  which  does  no  violence  to  modern 
culture,  a  philosophy  which  reverences  alike 
literature  and  science,  a  Gospel  which  is  as  deep 
as  all  human  need  and  as  wide  as  the  love  of  God. 
[54] 


Hallowed  Be   Thy  Name 

Such  a  Church  and  such  a  pulpit  the  world  needs 
to-day.  And  by  such  churchmanship  shall  all 
good  men  and  good  women  everywhere  seek  to 
realize  their  own  prayer:  Hallowed  be  Thy 
name. 

When  the  great  Scotch  Church  case  was  being 
tried  in  the  English  Courts  of  Justice,  the  editor 
of  the  British  Weekly  said  that  the  early  teachers 
of  the  Scotch  Free  Church  were  "  fiercely  ortho- 
dox." He  testified  that  when  prophets  of  their 
day  arose  and  pleaded  for  a  revision  of  the  cast- 
iron  standards  of  that  Church  they  were  "  hunted 
like  mad  dogs  " — the  phrase  is  his  own.  They 
were  hunted  Hke  mad  dogs,  indeed !  But  it  is 
not  permitted  to  Christian  people  to  hunt  their 
prophets  like  mad  dogs  !  In  the  providence  of 
God  it  has  been  ordained  that  with  what  measure 
ye  mete  it  shall  be  measured  to  you  again.  And 
God  is  not  mocked.  When  men  cry  against  one 
sent  from  God,  "  Crucify  him,"  they  are  apt  to 
find  that  the  blood  which  they  spill  falls  in 
scalding  streams  upon  their  heads  and  upon  those 
of  their  children  in  days  to  come.  "  Fierce  or- 
thodoxy "  is  all  very  well,  but  it  is  a  game  that 
[55] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

two  can  play  at.  The  altar-cloth  of  one  age  is 
the  door-mat  of  the  next.  When  you  try  to  run 
the  new  wine  into  the  old  skins,  the  skins  burst 
and  the  wine  is  lost.  Perhaps  it  is  new  wine- 
skins that  we  are  to  seek  to-day.  When  the  light 
from  heaven  falls  upon  our  path  to-day  shall  we 
not  have  grace  and  courage  to  walk  therein  ?  It 
was  the  Most  High  God  who  led  our  fathers  by  a 
way  they  knew  not. 

"  Yet  think  not  unto  them  was  lent 

All  light  for  all  the  coming  days, 
And  heaven's  eternal  wisdom  spent 

In  making  straight  the  ancient  ways. 

"  The  living  fountain  overflows 

For  every  flock,  for  every  lamb, 
Nor  heeds,  though  angry  creeds  oppose 

With  Luther's  dyke  and  Calvin's  dam." 

Believe  in  change.  We  may  grow  old,  old  in 
spirit  with  which  years  have  nothing  to  do,  but 
new  ideas  will  be  born  of  God's  love  for  men,  and 
our  children  will  receive  them.  Believe  in 
change.  Believe  that  it  is  God's  will  and  way, 
the  will  and  way  of  the  God  who  renews  Himself 
[56] 


Hallowed  Be   Thy  Name 

from  day  to  day  lest  one  good  custom  should 
corrupt  the  world.  Believe  that  your  fears  are 
themselves  dangerous  and  dishonouring — danger- 
ous to  your  own  usefulness,  dishonouring  to  the 
God  you  worship.  If  the  name  of  God  stands 
for  the  attributes  of  God,  if  Jesus  sums  up  the 
totality  of  God's  nature  in  the  name  by  which 
He  names  Him,  Our  Father ,  and  if  in  the  light 
of  God's  eternal  Fatherhood  the  creeds  of  the 
dark  ages  stand  condemned,  then.  Hallowed  be 
Thy  name  I 

And  the  other  way  in  which  we  can  seek  to 
answer  our  own  prayer  is  that  of  a  purer,  fuller, 
saintlier  hfe.  Improved  creeds  are  good,  but 
improved  characters  are  better.  The  humane 
preacher  of  an  inhuman  Gospel  is  often  told  that 
he  is  better  than  his  creed.  It  will  be  sin  and 
shame  to  us  who  profess  the  divinest  Gospel 
which  has  yet  been  made  known  to  the  children 
of  earth  if  our  contemporaries  and  posterity 
have  to  record  of  us  in  censure  or  pity  that  we 
were  worse  than  our  creed.  The  world's  right- 
eous contempt  for  moral  treachery  breathes  in 
Bro\)i^ning's  passionate  line, — 
[57] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

**  Whose  life  laughs  through  and  spits  at  their  creed  ! 
Who  maintain   Thee  in  word   and   defy  Thee  in 
deed." 

Brethren,  let  us  love,  for  love  is  of  God,  and 
God  is  love.  Let  us  count  the  day  ill  spent  in 
which  we  have  not  made  somebody  happy.  Let 
us^  sow  smiles  and  not  tears.  Passing  through 
the  valley  of  weeping  we  will  make  it  a  place  of 
springs.  With  simpleness  and  gentleness  and 
honour  and  clean  mirth  let  us  make  the  little 
world  which  feels  our  influence  a  brighter  spot. 
Let  our  homes  be  sacred,  the  place  of  peace. 
Let  our  Church  be  holy.  Let  the  men  and 
women  who  know  us  know  God  better  for  their 
knowledge  of  us.  And  the  Christ  who  is  our  life, 
may  He  be  so  evidently  manifested  in  our  life 
that  generations  shall  rise  up  to  echo  our  far- 
reaching  prayer :    Hallowed  be  Thy  name  ! 


[58] 


Ill 


Thy  Kingdom  Come 


Father,  let  Thy  kingdom  come,'^ 
Let  it  come  with  living  power; 
Speak  at  length  the  final  word, 
Usher  in  the  triumph  hour. 

As  it  came  in  days  of  old, 
In  the  deepest  hearts  of  men, 
When  Thy  martyrs  died  for  Thee, 
Let  it  come,  O  God,  again. 

Tyrant  thrones  and  idol  shrines, 
Let  them  from  their  place  be  hurled : 
Enter  on  Thy  better  reign, — 
Wear  the  crown  of  this  poor  world. 

Oh,  what  long,  sad  years  have  gone. 
Since  Thy  Church  was  taught  this  prayer ! 
Oh,  what  eyes  have  watched  and  wept 
For  the  dawning  everywhere  ! 

Break,  triumphant  day  of  God ! 
Break  at  last,  our  hearts  to  cheer ; 
Throbbing  souls  and  holy  songs 
Wait  to  hail  Thy  dawning  here. 

Empires,  temples,  sceptres,  thrones, — 
May  they  all  for  God  be  won  I 
And,  in  every  human  heart, 
Father,  let  Thy  kingdom  come. 

— John  Page  Hoppi. 


Ill 

THY  KINGDOM  COME 

WE  are  not  greatly  concerned  with  the 
question  as  to  the  meaning  which  the 
Jews  attached  to  the  phrase,  "  The 
Kingdom  of  Heaven "  or  "  The  Kingdom  of 
God."  It  is  quite  certain  that,  whatever  the 
Jews  meant  by  the  phrase,  our  Lord  meant  some- 
thing different.  He  preached,  and  did  many 
mighty  works,  and  loved,  and  went  about  doing 
good — and  they  sent  Him  to  the  cross.  What 
did  Jesus  mean?  How  did  He  think  of  the 
kingdom  ?  And  is  there  in  our  hearts  any  such 
desire,  corresponding  to  the  longing  in  the 
Saviour's  breast,  that  we  should  fervently  pray, 
Thy  kingdom  come  ? 

"  Kingdom  of  God  " — "  Kingdom  of  Heaven  " 
— both  phrases  appear  in  the  New  Testament. 
Which  did  our  Lord  use  ?  And  what  is  the  dif- 
ference between  them  ?  It  is  of  no  consequence. 
Probably  Jesus  used  either  phrase  as  occasion 
[6i] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

served.  Each  is  thrown  out  at  a  vast  idea,  too 
vast  for  any  form  of  speech  to  cover  it ;  and  it  is 
futile  to  seek  in  the  form  of  words  essential  dif- 
ference of  thought.  Does  either  phrase,  do  both, 
convey  a  meaning  to  you  ?  Do  you  pray  for  the 
coming  of  the  kingdom  upon  earth?  And  if 
you  do,  what  is  it  you  desire  when  you  pray  ? 

Jesus  meant  the  reign  of  love  and  goodness 
in  human  hearts.  Less  than  this  He  would  not 
mean  and  more  He  could  not.  We  must  clear 
our  minds  of  fantastic  and  artificial  rwtions  about 
the  kingdom,  together  with  the  high-sounding 
words  which  have  imposed  them  upon  the  be- 
wildered minds  of  people — "  theocratic,"  "  escha- 
tological,"  and  the  like  dreadful  things.  We 
must  refuse  to  think  of  a  state  within  a  state,  or 
of  a  kingdom  absorbing  kingdoms,  or  of  an 
overturning  of  human  rule  by  the  descent  of 
legions  of  angels  and  the  establishment  of  such  a 
system  of  law  and  administration  of  law  as  never 
was  on  sea  or  land.  We  are  to  clear  our  minds 
of  the  idea  that  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is  to  be 
in  heaven,  or  anywhere  else  than  in  our  homes, 
our  cities,  and  our  world.    And  we  must  relegate 

[62] 


Thy  Kingdom  Come 

to  the  limbo  of  dreams  the  idea  that  the  kingdom 
has  to  be  ushered  in  by  a  spectacular  judgment 
day,  a  dramatic  assize,  a  celestial  jury,  and  a 
glorified  Christ  throned  and  crowned  as  judge 
and  king  forevermore.  The  Kingdom  of  God 
is  the  kingdom  of  good,  the  kingdom  of  good- 
ness, and  it  is  found  wherever  men  and  women 
live  in  love  of  God  and  one  another.  It  is  called 
the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  by  way  of  contrast  to 
the  selfishness,  strife,  and  sin  of  earth.  It  is  high, 
exalted.  It  is  ideal,  glorious.  Where  love  is, 
there  God  is  also.  And  the  Kingdom  of  God 
has  its  loyal  subjects  where  men  and  women  live 
in  righteousness,  love,  and  peace.  In  a  word, 
when  we  pray  this  prayer  we  seek  the  universal 
reign  of  righteousness.  The  Kingdom  of 
Heaven  includes  all  good  men  and  women 
everywhere.  And  our  prayer  is  that  the  object 
of  Christ's  life  and  death  may  be  secured  over  all 
the  earth — He  came  to  make  us  good. 

Everything  then  that  tends  in  this  direction  is 
comprehended   in  the  Christian  scheme.     And 
you  have  at  once  a  conclusive  standard  of  appeal 
and  an  unfaiUng  inspiration. 
[63] 


The  Lord^s  Prayer 

First  you  have  a  test  by  which  to  determine 
the  character,  good  or  bad,  of  an  act,  a  move- 
ment, or  an  institution.  Does  it  make  for  the 
Kingdom  of  Heaven  ?  That  is  to  say,  docs  it 
tend  to  increase  the  sum  total  of  human  good- 
ness, peace,  and  love  ?  This  sweeps  away  at  a 
stroke  the  mass  of  artificial  distinctions  and  dis- 
criminations which  casuists,  trained  and  un- 
trained, Protestant  and  Catholic,  in  all  the 
Churches  have  been  so  fond  of  multiplying. 
The  distinction  between  secular  and  sacred  has 
always  been  unintelligible  to  the  candid  mind. 
Punch  many  years  ago,  when  Punch  was  wise 
and  witty,  satirized  these  artificialities.  The  car- 
toon showed  the  fond  mother  and  the  terrible 
child.  He  was  engaged  in  a  tussle  with  the  sofa 
cushion.  The  clergyman's  wife  had  called.  It 
was  Sunday  afternoon,  and  the  mother  had  to 
explain  that  as  it  was  Sunday  Tommy  could  not 
have  his  toys  and  so  she  had  given  him  the  sofa 
cushion  to  play  with.  Multitudes  of  people  in 
every  country  and  in  every  walk  of  life  have  found 
the  toys  secular  but  for  some  mysterious  reason 
the  sofa  cushion  sacred.  Some  of  you  are  old 
[64] 


Thy  Kingdom  Come 

enough  to  remember  when  a  piano  was  secular 
but  a  harmonium  sacred;  when  a  vioHn  was 
secular — and  still  more  terribly  secular  when  it 
was  called  a  fiddle — while  "  David's  harp  of 
sacred  sound "  was  all  but  divine.  We  have 
drawn  distinctions  between  sacred  music  and 
secular,  and,  what  is  worse,  between  sacred  and 
secular  actions  in  human  life.  These  distinctions 
have  not  helped.  They  were  not  sufficiently 
clear  cut.  They  did  not  mark  off  essential  dif- 
ferences. They  only  contrived  to  establish  con- 
ventional distinctions  for  which  ground  in  the 
reason  and  nature  of  things  could  not  readily  be 
discovered.  The  conception  of  the  Kingdom  of 
Heaven  gives  us  a  real  standard,  easily  under- 
stood, which  everybody  can  apply  and  apply 
universally.  Does  this  make  for  the  Kingdom 
of  Heaven  as  we  have  just  defined  the  Kingdom 
of  Heaven  ?  Or  does  it  not  ?  That  is  the  un- 
failing test. 

You  may  take  illustrations  that  seem  to  you 

very  small.     Unless  you  establish  such  a  standard 

they  may  even  seem  to  you  trivial.     Or  you  may 

take  illustrations  of  world-wide  significance.     The 

[65] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

rule  will  not  break  down.  Good  women  at 
Christmas  time  send  broadcast  through  this  city 
appeals  to  the  women  of  New  York  not  to  leave 
their  Christmas  shopping  until  the  latest  day  and 
the  latest  hour.  They  address  themselves  to  the 
clergy  of  the  city  and  seek  their  sympathetic  co- 
operation. They  would  have  us  appeal  to  you 
all  and  notably  to  women  to  have  some  con- 
sideration for  the  masses  of  people  who  serve 
your  needs.  What  has  this  to  do  with  the 
prayer,  Thy  kingdom  come  ?  Much — for  all  of 
us.  Overwork,  strain,  exhaustion  of  body  and 
brain  and  nerve  and  spirit,  exasperation  of  soul, 
discontent,  physical  injuries,  perhaps,  inflicted 
upon  weak,  underfed,  ill-nourished  constitutions 
— physical  injuries  which  may  lap  over  to  the 
next  generation — these  are  involved  in  your  lack 
of  thought  for  those  upon  whom  the  Christmas 
season  imposes  its  tremendous  burdens.  Meas- 
ure your  considerateness  on  the  one  hand,  or 
your  callous  indifference  on  the  other,  by  this  one 
test.  The  Kingdom  of  Heaven,  we  say  again 
and  again,  is  goodness,  love,  peace.  Now  pray 
in  your  heart  of  hearts  and  mean  your  prayer, 
[66] 


Thy  Kingdom  Come 

Xhy  kingdom  come — and  the  appeal  of  these 
good  women  will  not  fail. 

The  newspapers  of  late  have  been  full  of 
stories  of  experiments  made  in  the  direction  of 
painless  surgery.  Ours  is  an  age  in  which  our 
own  bodies  fascinate  us,  and  we  are  all  of  us  in- 
terested in  matters  of  health  and  disease,  of 
medicine  and  surgery;  and  our  minds  have 
turned  again  to  the  discoveries  and  achievements 
of  the  science  of  healing  in  our  time.  We  have 
looked  with  gratitude  and  with  pride  upon  the 
outpouring  of  wealth  for  medical  research,  for 
hospitals,  and  for  the  daily,  hourly  conflict  with 
disease  which  the  world  is  waging.  Is  this 
secular  or  sacred?  Is  it  sacred  to  preach  a 
sermon  and  secular  to  cure  diphtheria?  Is  it 
sacred  to  give  a  dollar  to  the  foreign  missionary 
society  and  secular  to  give  a  million  to  the 
crusade  against  tuberculosis  or  some  other  form 
of  human  suffering  ?  The  distinctions  are  ridic- 
ulous ;  the  question  is  absurd.  Is  this  really  a 
strife  against  human  sufferings?  Are  these  ef- 
forts, researches,  gifts,  all  this  consecration  of 
wealth  and  skill  and  thought,  really  making  for 
[67] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

human  happiness  and  the  good  of  the  human 
race  ?  Then  we  know  where  we  stand,  and  our 
prayer  has  vital  meaning :     Thy  kingdom  come. 

Nobody  denies  that  the  prayer-meeting  is 
sacred.  But  why  should  we  think  the  political 
meeting  secular  ?  The  work  of  the  Church  we 
have  always  held  to  be  sacred.  Is  not  the  rule  of 
the  city  and  the  government  of  the  nation  sacred, 
too  ?  Is  it  sacred  to  sing  hymns  and  secular  to 
see  that  righteous  men  are  set  to  administer 
righteous  laws  ?  Is  it  sacred  to  read  the  Sermon 
on  the  Mount  and  even  to  repeat  every  one  of 
the  petitions  of  the  Lord's  Prayer,  and  at  the 
same  time  to  stand  by  and  allow  the  white  slave 
traffic  with  its  festering  corruption  to  flourish  in 
the  great  cities  of  the  land  ?  William  Penn 
taught  in  his  time  that  a  Christian  man  should 
make  it  part  of  his  religion  to  see  that  his  coun- 
try is  well  governed.  Does  your  political  work 
look  in  the  direction  of  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  ? 
Does  it  tend  to  set  up  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven 
on  earth  ?  Or  if  the  earth  is  too  wide  a  field  for 
you  to  contemplate,  does  it  tend  to  make  more 
good  men  and  good  women  in  your  city  and  in 
[68] 


Thy  Kingdom  Come 

your  state  ?  Does  it  make  it  easier  for  people  to 
do  right  and  more  difficult  for  them  to  do  wrong  ? 
These  are  practical  questions.  These  are  living 
issues.  And  they  have  a  thousand  times  more 
vitality  and  meaning  than  the  old,  bewildering 
distinction  between  secular  and  sacred. 

It  is  not  wasting  time  to  insist  on  the  need  of 
clearer  and  better  definitions.  Let  us  return  to 
an  illustration  already  used,  the  question  of 
music,  secular  or  sacred.  The  artist  would  tell 
you  that  no  such  distinction  exists.  There  may 
be  good  music  and  bad  music ;  sacred  and 
secular  there  cannot  be.  But  consider.  There 
is  music  which  elevates  and  sublimes  the  soul ; 
there  is  music  which  soothes  and  heals — and 
music  which  has  no  such  effect  on  any  living 
human  being.  There  is  music  which  brings 
thoughts  and  feelings  vague  and  vast,  thoughts 
and  feelings  which  reach  out  towards  the  Infinite, 
which  prepares  the  mind  for  wonder  and  worship 
and  leads  one  near  to  God.  Such  music  is,  what- 
ever the  phrases  we  choose,  devotional  in  its 
character.  That  is  to  say,  it  subdues  the  mind  to 
quietness  and  obedience  or  exalts  the  soul  to 
[69] 


The  Lord^s  Prayer 

enthusiasm  and  consecration.  No  need  to  ask  of 
such  music :  Is  it  secular  or  sacred  ?  It  makes 
for  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven.  Well,  apply  this 
test  to  many  of  the  things  you  use  and  the  prac- 
tices in  which  you  indulge,  the  newspapers  you 
read,  the  magazines,  the  novels,  the  plays  to 
which  you  go  and  the  opera,  and  your  amuse- 
ments generally.  It  is  no  longer  possible  to 
draw  a  straight  line  down  the  middle  and  put  on 
the  right  hand  things  that  are  sacred  and  on  the 
left  hand  things  that  are  secular.  But  what  is 
the  tendency  of  these  ?  Do  they  make  for  the 
Kingdom  of  Heaven  ?  Do  they  tend  to  establish 
the  reign  of  goodness  and  of  love  in  human 
hearts  ?  The  newspaper  is  a  necessity  of  civilized 
life.  Few  people  would  care  to  live  without  it. 
The  world  would  be  a  sad  place  without  a  novel 
in  it.  The  histrionic  instinct  is  one  of  the  root 
instincts  of  our  nature.  The  demand  for  amuse- 
ment is  as  fundamental  as  the  necessity  for  food 
and  drink.  But  food  may  be  adulterated  and 
drink  may  be  poisoned,  the  press  may  corrupt, 
novels  may  debauch,  and  the  theatre  demoralize. 
If  you  sit  in  your  own  library  and  reach  out  your 
[70] 


Thy  Kingdom  Come 

hand  to  any  one  of  the  four  book-hned  walls 
which  surround  you,  you  know  that  you  may 
touch  the  mind  of  a  teacher  and  the  heart  of  a 
prophet,  or,  on  the  other  hand,  one  of  the  enemies 
of  the  human  race.  It  is  the  same  with  your 
common  pursuits,  with  the  amusements  you 
choose,  and  the  plays  that  are  offered  from  a 
hundred  theatres.  England  has  a  censor  of 
plays,  and  a  most  ludicrous  spectacle  he  is. 
Mediaeval  courts  have  had  a  curious  functionary 
called  the  Keeper  of  the  King's  Conscience. 
There  can  be  no  censor  of  your  amusements  and 
pleasures  other  than  the  one  which  your  own 
judgment  and  conscience  admit,  and  that  con- 
science is  in  your  own  keeping.  Do  these  things 
make  for  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  ?  Are  they 
making  a  better  man  or  woman  of  you,  or  a 
worse  ?  Are  you  more  sensitive  to  spiritual  im- 
pressions because  of  this  book  you  have  just  read 
or  this  play  you  have  just  seen  ?  Has  the  play 
inclined  you  to  cynical  views  of  life,  to  a  callous 
disregard  of  human  suffering  ?  Has  it  even  won 
from  you  a  laugh  at  things  that  in  the  Church 
and  in  your  silent  prayers  you  know  should  be 
[71] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

treated  with  reverence  ?  Or  has  it  brought  you 
into  a  happy  content  with  the  sweetness  and 
gentleness  and  goodness  of  Ufe  ?  Has  it  made 
you  feel  at  peace  with  yourself  and  with  the 
world  ?  Has  it  shown  you  how  awful  goodness 
is  and  how  hateful  are  selfishness  and  cruelty  ? 
You  will  answer  all  these  questions  without^an- 
swering  them  at  all  if  you  pray  with  the  heart 
and  with  the  understanding  also :  Thjf  kingdom 
come. 

Some  things  in  life  are  intrinsically  good, 
though  good  things  may  be  perverted  to  evil 
uses.  Some  things  are  intrinsically  bad,  and  it 
seems  as  though  nothing  in  the  world  could 
make  them  good.  But  the  overwhelming  major- 
ity of  things  with  which  we  have  to  deal  are  in 
themselves  neither  good  nor  bad.  They  are 
morally  indifferent.  All  turns  upon  the  spirit  in 
which  we  deal  with  them.  We  are  not  to  lose 
sight  of  this  question  of  secularity  and  sacred- 
ness.  But  secularity  and  sacredness  are  in  the 
spirit  and  not  in  the  thing.  One  man  may  come 
to  the  Lord's  Table  in  a  spirit  so  narrow,  so 
hard,  so  formal,  so  undevout  as  to  make  his  pres- 
[72] 


Thy  Kingdom   Come 

ence  there  the  most  secular  thing  in  the  week  for 
him.  Another  may  come  to  a  poHtical  meeting 
and  take  part  in  a  contested  election  in  the  very 
spirit  of  Him  who  died  upon  a  cross.  His 
citizenship  is  to  him  as  sacred  as  patriotism  to 
Abraham  Lincoln  or  liberty  to  George  Wash- 
ington. By  what  spirit  are  you  moved  ?  The 
prayer  for  the  coming  of  God's  kingdom  on 
earth  should  supply  the  answer.  If  it  is  true 
and  deep,  if  you  long  with  a  great  longing  to  see 
goodness  and  love  and  peace  extend  their  bliss- 
ful reign  in  human  hearts,  you  have  the  answer. 
Then  you  will  touch  nothing  indifferent  in  itself 
without  Hfting  it  to  the  plane  which  you  your- 
self occupy.  The  undevout  will  become  devout 
to  you,  the  unsacred  sacred.  And  as  the  prophet 
saw  in  vision  that  the  very  bells  upon  the  horses 
in  the  street  bore  the  inscription  "  Holiness  unto 
the  Lord,"  so  will  you  inscribe  upon  every  act 
and  deed  of  yours,  your  amusements,  your  avoca- 
tions, your  recreations,  your  business  and  the  toil 
by  which  you  live,  the  selfsame  "  Holiness  unto 
the  Lord,"  This  is  what  we  mean  when  we 
pray  :  Thy  kingdom  come. 
[73] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

Here  is  a  mighty  inspiration.  "  The  seventh 
angel  sounded  and  there  followed  great  voices  in 
heaven  and  they  said:  the  kingdoms  of  this 
world  are  become  the  kingdom  of  our  Lord  and 
of  His  Christ,  and  He  shall  reign  forever  and 
ever."  "  Are  become,"  if  you  please,  and  not 
"  shall  become."  It  was  a  daring,  soaring,  aspir- 
ing prevision.  The  kingdoms  of  this  world! 
In  the  hour  when  "  the  beast "  was  triumphant, 
when  from  beneath  the  altar  the  souls  of  the 
martyred  cried,  "  How  long,  O  God,  how  long  ?" 
— the  kingdoms  of  this  world  are  become  the 
kingdom  of  our  Lord  and  of  His  Christ !  Has 
our  vision  waxed  dim  or  our  faith  failed  ?  Have 
our  hearts  grown  cold  or  is  our  imagination 
paralyzed  by  fear  ?  The  kingdoms  of  literature, 
of  art,  of  music,  of  science,  the  kingdoms  of 
wealth  and  achievement  and  ambition,  the  king- 
doms of  commerce  and  industry  and  poHtics,  our 
kingdoms,  the  kingdoms  over  which  each  sov- 
ereign conscience  rules,  and  the  kingdoms  we 
have  made  of  our  cities  and  of  all  our  inter- 
national relations,  the  kingdoms  where  greed 
rules  and  passion  and  low  life  in  high  places,  and 
[74] 


Thy  Kingdom  Come 

the  kingdoms  of  heathen  darkness  in  the  far  lands 
— the  kingdoms  of  this  world  are  become  the 
kingdom  of  our  Lord  and  of  His  Christ !  We 
will  claim  them  for  His,  and  will  be  satisfied  with 
nothing  which  excludes  Him  from  any  corner  of 
His  kingdom.  His  is  the  right  of  eminent 
domain.  And  every  flaunting  evil  must  be  made 
subject  unto  Him  as  our  mighty  prayer  enshrines 
our  mightier  faith  :     Thy  kingdom  come. 

Upon  the  intensity  with  which  we  pray  this 
prayer  depends  the  vigour  of  our  own  spiritual 
life.  For  each  of  us  salvation  is  in  it.  Salva- 
tion— how  easily  we  use  the  word!  Salvation 
from  what?  Salvation  from  our  own  selves. 
Salvation  from  self-indulgence.  Salvation  from 
mean  and  narrow  views.  Remember  the  expul- 
sive power  of  a  new  affection.  No  man  or 
woman  is  so  safe  from  the  assault  of  sin  as  they 
whose  lives  are  merged  in  some  sacred  cause. 
Indeed,  no  one  of  us  is  safe  until  in  this  way  his 
life  is  hidden  with  Christ  in  God. 


'*  No  heart  is  pure  that  is  not  passionate 
No  virtue  is  safe  that  is  not  enthusiastic." 

[751 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

How  such  a  conception  of  religion  would  re- 
deem lives  from  littleness!  The  Apostle  Paul 
speaks  of  some  of  his  friends  as  "  fellow  workers 
unto  the  Kingdom  of  God."  Nothing  less  would 
serve  them.  And  nothing  less  should  serve  us. 
We  cannot  confine  our  ministry  within  the  walls 
of  our  church  building,  nor  within  the  charmed 
circle  of  our  homes.  We  are  not  fellow  workers 
together  with  the  Apostle,  we  are  not  fellow 
workers  together  with  Christ,  for  our  own 
Church  or  our  own  denomination.  Names  and 
sects  and  creeds  and  parties — how  small  they  be- 
come! The  shibboleths  of  sectarianism,  the 
watchwords  of  denominations,  the  battle-cries  of 
theological  controversies — how  they  shrink  into 
insignificance  !  Our  Church  is  dear  to  us.  Our 
homes  are  sacred.  Party  organization  and  de- 
nominational machinery  have  their  values  ;  direc- 
tion of  effort,  limitation  when  need  arises — all 
these  have  their  place  in  any  rational  scheme  of 
Christian  service.  But  these  things  are  not  the  end. 
A  means  to  an  end  they  may  be.  But  the  end,  the 
one  far-off,  divine  event  to  which  the  whole  cre- 
ation moves,  the  end  is  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven ! 
[76] 


Thy  Kingdom  Come 

It  is  difficult  to  restrain  one's  language  in  pres- 
ence of  such  a  vision.  Only  the  greatest  words 
avail.  One  is  tempted  to  become  grandiloquent 
from  very  lack  of  strong  and  beautiful  and 
glorious  words  to  express  the  Unmeasured  and 
the  Infinite  in  terms  of  human  speech.  We  look 
for  the  coming  of  a  day  when  there  shall  be  no 
more  poverty  nor  sorrow,  no  more  pain  nor 
death ;  when  the  tears  shall  be  wiped  from  every 
eye.  We  look  for  a  redeemed  humanity  upon  a 
regenerated  earth.  We  look  for  the  day  when 
there  shall  be  no  widows  weeping  nor  orphans 
starving,  nor  manhood  and  womanhood  changed 
from  the  image  of  God,  We  look  for  the  com- 
ing of  a  time  when  the  clash  of  arms  shall 
be  no  more;  when  there  shall  be  no  more 
war  of  armies  or  battle-ships  or  hostile  tariffs; 
when  frontier  lines  between  nations  shall  be 
obliterated  and  the  barriers  between  the  peo- 
ples burnt;  when  oppression  and  injustice  and 
hatred  shall  have  ceased  amongst  mankind ;  when 
there  shall  be  no  more  superstition  in  Asia,  nor 
heathenism  in  Africa,  nor  oppression  in  Europe, 
nor  injustice  in  America  ;  no  flames  of  blood-red 
[77] 


The  Lord^s  Prayer 

hate  kindling  from  one  end  of  Russia  to  the 
other ;  no  millions  starving  in  India,  nor  blood 
shed  in  rivers  in  the  forests  of  the  Congo ;  nor  in 
the  dark  places  of  our  city  life  the  cry  of  the  dis- 
inherited and  the  despoiled,  the  victims  of  man's 
treachery  and  greed.  Compared  with  these  vast 
dreams  our  sectarian  bigotries  and  personal 
rivalries  and  the  struggle  for  personal  ends 
which  shape  our  days  become  contemptible  and 
grotesque.  We  are  content  to  do  the  work  that 
lies  to  our  hands,  loving  that  which  is  near  us 
and  around  us,  adding  each  single,  solitary  en- 
deavour to  our  world-wide  hopes,  line  upon  line, 
precept  upon  precept,  adding  here  some  pain- 
ful inch  won  by  homely  service,  only  in  the 
inspiring  belief  in  the  coming  of  the  day 
when 

"  The  peoples  all  are  one,  and  all  their  voices  blend 
in  choric 
Hallelujah  to  the  Maker,  '  It  is  finished.     Man  is 
made.'  " 

This  mighty  hope  has  been  the  inspiration  of 
the  best  and  bravest  of  earth's  children.     Age  by 
[78] 


Thy  Kingdom  Come 

age  it  has  nerved  and  braced  them  to  the  most 
heroic  endurances  and  endeavours.  This  was  the 
true  light  which  shone  upon  their  path  when 
their  God-ward  march  began,  the  star-beams 
which  lit  the  patriarchal  ages,  the  first  faint  dawn- 
ing of  the  morning  in  which  walked  the  gray 
fathers  of  the  race,  and  which  for  their  faithful 
sons  is  broadening  into  the  perfect  day  of  God. 
In  the  foreshadowings  of  such  a  dawn,  when  the 
dayspring  from  on  high  first  visited  the  earth, 
Abraham  abandoned  the  gods  of  his  fathers  to  go 
forth,  not  knowing  whither  he  went,  at  the  call 
of  the  Judge  of  all  the  earth,  his  shield  and  his 
exceeding  great  reward.  In  the  flush  of  the 
morning,  Moses,  large  in  heart  and  brain,  led  a 
nation  from  bondage  towards  the  Promised  Land, 
and  David  laid  the  foundations  of  an  enduring 
kingdom.  Isaiah  of  Jerusalem  and  his  tuneful 
brother  of  Babylon,  the  prophets  of  the  evangel, 
proclaimed  God's  love  and  righteousness  for  all 
mankind,  a  Gospel  which  was  to  increase  with 
the  process  of  the  suns.  Through  exile,  oppres- 
sion, and  death  the  hope  hved  and  glowed. 
Devout  souls  waited  for  the  consolation  of  Israel, 
[79] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

and  in  the  assurance  that  it  was  near  prayed  that 
they  might  depart  in  peace.  John  Baptist  with 
his  voice  of  revolution  declared  that  though  the 
axe  was  laid  at  the  root  of  trees,  the  Kingdom  of 
Heaven  was  at  hand. 

Our  Lord  and  Saviour  came ;  the  thunders  of 
Sinai  were  drowned  in  the  still  small  voice  that 
breathed  from  Olivet,  the  sun  was  darkened  in 
the  sky,  and  nature  shuddered  at  the  tragedy  of 
Calvary ;  but  angels  rolled  the  stone  away  from 
the  new  made  grave,  the  Conqueror  of  death 
stepped  forth,  bringing  life  and  immortality  to 
light,  and  a  deathless  hope  became  the  change- 
less certainty  of  mankind.  Then  Augustine  saw 
as  in  a  vision  the  City  of  God ;  Bernard  of 
Clugny  beheld  it  from  afar,  a  sweet  and  blessed 
country,  the  home  of  God's  elect ;  and  for  the 
hope  of  it  and  love's  dear  sake  beneath  Umbria's 
skies  Francis  of  Assisi  wooed  his  sweet  bride 
Poverty,  the  sister  of  his  Christ.  John  Milton  in 
his  blindness  saw  the  heavenly  light  and  in  the 
brightness  of  its  shining  set  himself  to  assert 
eternal  Providence  and  justify  the  ways  of  God  to 
men.  John  Bunyan  from  the  prison  cell  which 
[80] 


Thy  Kingdom   Come 

he  called  a  den  dreamed  his  golden  dream  of  the 
progress  earth's  pilgrims  yet  shall  make  from  the 
City  of  Destruction  over  the  Delectable  Moun- 
tains and  to  Beulah  Land.  Oliver  Cromwell,  un- 
crowned king  of  men,  flung  open  the  world-gates 
for  a  free,  world-conquering  race.  Men  of  the 
Book,  men  of  faith,  men  of  sanity  and  vision, 
trusted  themselves  to  Atlantic  waves  and  to  a 
stern  and  rock-bound  coast  and  laid  the  founda- 
tions of  this  radiant  empire  of  the  West.  Jesuit 
missionaries  marched  from  the  Atlantic  to  the 
Mississippi ;  men  who  feared  God  and  none  beside 
sang  their  hymns  amid  the  fastnesses  of  the  AUe- 
ghanies  ;  Roger  Williams  in  his  forest  exile  made 
secure  the  liberty  of  the  soul  for  the  nation  still 
unborn.  Carey,  Marshman,  and  Ward  expected 
great  things  from  God,  attempted  great  things 
for  God,  and  gloried  in  the  hope  of  the  world 
won  for  Christ.  Comber,  Grenfell,  Hanning- 
ton,  Paton,  Chalmers,  Morrison,  Judson — what 
names  are  these  on  the  bead-roll  of  the  immortals ! 
And  how  they  lived  and  loved  and  died  in  the 
grace  and  fervour  of  this  prayer  :  Thy  kingdom 
come  I . 

[81] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 


But 


"  Never  was  to  chosen  race 

That  unstinted  tide  confined  ; 
Thine  is  every  time  and  place, 
Fountain  sweet  of  heart  and  mind." 

In  ancient  Egypt  it  was  seen  that  the  gifts  of 
the  gods  were  to  him  who  sowed  smiles  and  not 
tears,  and  in  their  Book  of  the  Dead  it  was  writ- 
ten that  the  pure  soul  was  he  who  had  prepared 
the  way  for  the  coming  of  the  Kingdom  of  Love. 
Amid  the  Persian  hills  Zoroaster  called  upon  each 
brave  heart  to  follow  light  and  do  the  right  and 
give  battle  with  the  prince  of  the  powers  of  the 
air.  Plato  saw  that  an  eternal  love  and  beauty 
and  goodness  wait  upon  the  soul  from  its  birth. 
Socrates  held  and  taught  that  man  only  lives  to 
obey  the  commands  of  God.  And  in  after  ages 
Thomas  More  in  his  "  Utopia,"  Bacon  in  his  '•  New 
Atlantis,"  Campanella  in  his  "  City  of  the  Sun," 
devout  beyond  their  knowledge  and  their  thought, 
pointed  men's  minds  to  the  ever-growing  hope  of 
humanity  that  the  creation  itself  should  be  de- 
livered from  the  bondage  of  corruption,  while  gen- 
erations prayed  the  prayer  :     Thy  kingdom  come. 


Thy  Kingdom  Come 

The  world  has  known  terror  and  darkness. 
Right  has  raised  its  head  upon  the  scaffold. 
Wrong  has  trembled  on  the  throne.  Hell 
has  enlarged  its  appetite  against  the  children 
of  God.  But  the  thought  of  the  kingdom 
has  changed  agony  to  triumph  and  the  groans 
of  the  martyrs  into  the  bliss  of  the  re- 
deemed. And  still  that  hope  flourishes  in  hu- 
man hearts : 

"  'Tis  weary  watching  wave  by  wave, 

And  yet  the  tide  heaves  onward  ; 
We  climb,  like  corals,  grave  by  grave, 

That  pave  a  pathway  sunward ; 
We  are  driven  back,  for  our  next  fray 

A  newer  strength  to  borrow, 
And  where  the  Vanguard  camps  To-day, 

The  Rear  shall  rest  To-morrow. 

"  Through  all  the  long,  dark  night  of  years 
The  people's  cry  ascendeth, 
And  earth  is  wet  with  blood  and  tears. 

But  our  meek  sufferance  endeth. 
The  few  shall  not  forever  sway, 

The  many  moil  in  sorrow ; 
The  Powers  of  Hell  are  strong  To-day; 
Our  Kingdom  come  To-morrow. 

[83] 


The  Lord^s  Prayer 

*'  Though  hearts  brood  o'er  the  Past,  our  eyes 

With  smiling  Futures  glisten  ; 
For  lo  !  our  day  bursts  up  the  skies, 

Lean  out  your  souls  and  listen. 
The  world  is  rolling  Freedom's  way, 

And  ripening  with  her  sorrow  ; 
Take  heart ;  who  bear  the  Cross  To-day 

Shall  wear  the  crown  To-morrow." 

By  the  light  of  the  distant  ideal  we  walk  our 
daily  path.  Its  radiant  hues  make  drudgery 
divine.  Our  lowly  toil  carries  its  world-wide 
implications.  We  are  happy  in  the  small  thing 
we  achieve  because  we  know  it  to  be  world- 
great,  shot  through  and  through  with  the  spirit 
of  this  dominating  prayer  :     TAj/  kingdom  come. 


L84] 


IV 


Thy  Will  be  Done^  as  in  Heaveny 
so  on  Earth 


Nobody  ought  to  despair  whose  cause  is  just.  Nobody  is 
justified  in  despairing  if  he  has  a  righteous  cause  to  uphold.  It 
may  not  be  given  to  him  to  see  it  triumph,  but  that  is  only  a 
question  of  time ;  it  is  an  immaterial  thing ;  but  the  right  itself, 
why,  there  is  no  power  on  earth  can  ever  stay  it.  None  can 
ever  defeat  it  in  the  end.  God  Himself  is  pledged  to  its  final 
victory. —  William  Lloyd  Garrison. 


IV 


THY  WILL  BE  DONE,  AS  IN  HEAVEN,  SO 
ON  EARTH 


TP 


HIS  is  not  a  prayer  of  Resignation  but 
-         of  Consecration.     It  is  not  the  plea  for 

"^  patience  by  which  an  afflicted  heart 
seeks  peace,  but  the  vow  of  a  vigorous  soul  that 
dreams  and  dares.  It  is  not  a  sigh  of  surrender 
to  inscrutable  and  implacable  fate.  It  is  the  swift 
intake  of  breath  and  the  bracing  of  the  nerve  for 
renewed  struggle  to  bring  in  the  eternal  reign  of 
righteousness. 

Too  often  we  have  thought  otherwise.  And 
we  have  thought  weakly.  In  the  midst  of  our 
disappointed  purposes  and  broken  hopes  this  has 
seemed  to  us  a  prayer  for  that  dutiful  and  humble 
acceptance  of  unavoidable  ills  which  shuts  out  re- 
pining and  clings  to  the  mercy  of  God.  The 
prayer  has  been  too  often  a  mournful  wail.  At 
the  best,  its  plaintive  tones  have  spoken  the  sad- 
ness of  the  spirit  that  seeks  solace  in  submission. 
[87] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

When  the  heart  has  been  wrung  by  anguish, 
when  the  waters  have  overwhelmed  us,  the  proud 
waters  have  gone  over  our  soul,  when  we  have 
been  beaten  back  and  trampled  down  and  when 
the  sun  has  darkened  in  our  sky  and  the  stars 
forgot  their  shining,  in  the  wreck  of  a  career,  in 
the  blight  of  hope,  when  the  unforeseen  and  the 
unlooked  for  has  made  mock  of  our  ambitions, 
when  a  lingering  sickness  has  taken  out  of  our 
hfe  that  which  alone  made  life  worth  living,  or 
death  robbed  us  of  that  which  has  given  us  the 
best  joy  we  have  known  on  earth  and  left  us,  as 
it  seemed,  friendless,  unpitied,  homeless  in  the 
night,  then  we  have  tried  to  stay  our  faltering 
faith  on  God  with  this  prayer  of  fathomless  pain ; 
Thy  will  be  done. 

Charlotte  Elliott's  favourite  but  too  feminine 
hymn  reflects  the  mood  in  which  the  prayer  rises 
to  our  lips : 


My  God,  my  Father,  while  I  stray 
Far  from  my  home  on  life's  rough  way, 
Oh,  teach  me  from  my  heart  to  say, — 
Thy  will  be  done  ! 
[88] 


Thy  Will  Be  Done 

If  Thou  shouldst  call  me  to  resign 
What  most  I  prize, — it  ne'er  was  mine: 
I  only  yield  Thee  what  was  Thine ; 
Thy  will  be  done  ! 

May  the  day  never  dawn  for  any  man  or 
woman  when  you  cannot  pray  that  prayer ! 
May  you  never  know  the  sorrow  so  crushing,  the 
loss  so  charged  with  agony,  that  your  devout  will 
cannot  make  your  own  the  will  that  governs  the 
universe,  and  pray  with  deepest  fervour,  from 
the  midst  of  blinding  tears  :     Thy  will  be  done. 

But  the  mistake  is  in  supposing  that  it  is  the 
prayer  for  such  times  and  such  trials  alone,  in  sup- 
posing, indeed,  that  it  is  first  and  chiefly  a  prayer  for 
these  experiences  of  affliction  and  loss.  Consider 
the  words  of  the  petition  as  our  Lord  teaches 
them  to  us  :  Thy  will  be  done,  as  in  heaven,  so 
on  earth — as  in  heaven  where  is  no  blight  nor 
sorrow  nor  bitter  grief,  where  there  shall  be  pain 
and  sighing  no  more,  and  where  God  shall  wipe 
the  tears  from  every  eye.  There — where  there  is 
no  resignation  and  no  submission,  and  no  sad  en- 
durance of  unavoidable  ills  because  there  is  no 
trouble  there — God's  will  is  done,  and  our  prayer 
[89] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

is  that  it  may  be  accomplished,  as  in  heaven,  so 
on  earth.  Let  the  tried  and  suffering  heart  pray 
this  prayer  in  the  depth  of  mortal  pain,  but  also, 
let  us  pray  it  as  devoutly  when  life  runs  riotously 
in  our  veins  and  all  the  joy  of  the  world  is  cours- 
ing in  our  blood.  When  you  are  young,  daring, 
aspiring,  when  you  have  energy,  ambition,  pride, 
when  you  are  capable  of  heroism,  chivalry,  and 
gallant  enterprise,  then  I  beg  you  pray  this 
prayer.  Thy  will  be  done.  Bind  it  upon  your 
heart  as  a  spell.  Bear  it  upon  your  spirit  as  a 
passion.  See  it  written  in  the  sky  above  you 
and  on  the  earth  beneath  your  feet.  Read  it 
everywhere !  Let  the  trees  mean  it  and  the 
grassy  sod  and  the  city  street  and  the  throngs 
that  come  and  go.  Let  life  have  no  other 
grander  meaning  than  this  which  vibrates  in  our 
living  prayer :  Thy  will  be  done  !  In  us,  by  us, 
through  us  :  Our  Father,  Thy  will  be  done  !  In 
our  homes  and  in  our  hearts,  in  the  commerce  of 
our  country,  in  her  industry,  finance,  law,  science, 
in  the  government  of  her  cities,  in  her  home  and 
foreign  policies,  in  her  relations  with  inferior 
peoples,  in  all  for  which  America  has  been  raised 
[90] 


Thy  Will  Be  Done 

up  by  the  God  of  Nations — Our  Father,  Thy  will 
be  done!  And  not  in  this  land  alone,  but  in 
every  land  beneath  the  sun  let  the  mighty  prayer 
go  sounding  on,  and  there  may  He  who  hears 
and  answers  prayer  respond  to  the  appealing  of 
His  people  !  As  in  heaven,  so  in  the  business  of 
cities,  the  affairs  of  states,  and  in  the  broad  fields 
of  international  life :  Tfiy  will  be  done  !  And 
let  us  seek  to  answer  our  own  prayer — as  far  as 
in  us  Hes.  Let  us  despise  ourselves  if  we  seek  to 
cast  on  God  the  burthen  He  in  His  gracious 
providence  would  impose  on  us.  At  the  least 
and  the  lowest,  let  us  seek  cooperative  service 
with  Him.  Let  us  be  fellow  workers  together 
with  God.  Let  us  do  His  will  and  count  that 
day  ill  spent  in  which  we  have  not  sincerely  tried 
to  help  Him  to  get  His  will  done,  as  in  heaven, 
so  in  the  little  corner  of  the  earth  in  which  He 
has  placed  us.  Charlotte  Elliott's  hymn  is  good 
— for  the  hour  of  bereavement,  pain,  and  loss. 
But  life  is  not  all  bereavement,  pain,  and  loss. 
Life  is  resolution,  achievement,  attainment.  Life 
is  "  going-on  "  !  It  is  progress,  victory.  It  is 
the  conquest  of  the  world  for  Christ.  And  a  less 
[91] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

familiar  but  not  less  spiritual  hymn  echoes  the 
Saviour's  prayer, — 

O  God,  not  only  in  distress. 
In  pain,  and  want,  and  weariness, 
Thy  tender  Spirit  stoops  to  bless, 
Thy  will  is  done. 

But  oftener  on  the  wings  of  peace 
And  girt  about  with  tenderness, 
Thou  comest,  and  all  troubles  cease. 
Thy  will  is  done. 

If  we  are  to  pray  this  prayer  it  must  be  in- 
telligently offered.  For  it  may  degenerate  into 
the  expression  of  a  Mohammedan  fatahsm,  a 
slavish  acquiescence  in  evil  conditions,  a  blasphe- 
mous ascription  of  the  consequences  of  man's  sin 
and  selfishness  to  the  operations  of  Almighty 
love.  We  may  be  tempted  to  find  an  excuse  for 
our  incompetence  or  laziness  or  self-indulgence 
in  a  supposed  will  of  God.  When  the  people  of 
England  were  dying  of  starvation  in  sight  of 
barns  and  warehouses  stored  with  food,  when  the 
pallid  faces  of  wives  and  little  ones  hungering 
even  unto  death  raised  hell  in  the  hearts  of  Eng- 
lish men,  the  Hereditary  Earl  Marshal  of  Eng- 
[92] 


Thy  Will  Be  Done 

land  said  that  a  drink  of  hot  water  with  a  dash  of 
curry  powder  in  it  was  admirable  for  staving  off 
the  pangs  of  hunger,  and  a  famous  bishop  de- 
clared that  people  who  could  not  get  bread  would 
find  turnips  an  admirable  substitute.  When  the 
people  demanded  a  share  in  the  making  of  laws 
under  which  they  were  supposed  to  live  but  by 
which  they  were  really  done  to  death,  another 
spiritual  pastor  and  master  said  that  for  his  very 
life  he  did  not  know  what  the  people  had  to  do 
with  the  laws  except  obey  them,  nor  what  they  had 
to  do  with  the  taxes — except  pay  them.  Nothing 
was  easier  for  the  smug  and  the  self-satisfied  than 
to  tell  the  famished  hordes  of  miserable  men  to 
submit  themselves  to  the  will  of  God.  And  Eb- 
cnezer  Elliott,  in  that  fine  hymn  which  we  some- 
times sing,  sent  his  protest  to  the  throne  of  God :— . 

Shall  crime  bring  crime  forever, 

Strength  aiding  still  the  strong  ? 
Is  it  Thy  will,  O  Father, 

That  man  shall  toil  for  wrong  ? 
"No,"  say  Thy  mountains;  "No,"  Thy  skies; 
Man's  clouded  sun  shall  brightly  rise, 
And  songs  ascend  instead  of  sighs. 
God  save  the  people  ! 

[93] 


The  Lord's  Prayer^ 

That  such  a  protest  has  been  needed  in  this 
country  Lowell's  poem  "  Hunger  and  Cold " 
bears  witness  : — 

God  has  plans  man  must  not  spoil, 
Some  were  made  to  starve  and  toil. 
Some  to  share  the  wine  and  oil, 

We  are  told : 
Devil's  theories  are  these, 
Stifling  hope  and  love  and  peace. 
Framed  your  hideous  lusts  to  please, 
Hunger  and  Cold ! 

It  is  not  with  such  refinements  of  cruelty  as 
these,  cruelty  veiling  itself  with  hypocritical  de- 
voutness,  that  we  will  seek  to  understand  and 
obey  the  will  of  God.  When  pestilence  stalked 
through  the  land  of  England  the  leaders  of  the 
Church  memorialized  the  Prime  Minister  to  ap- 
point a  day  of  national  humiliation,  fasting,  and 
prayer.  Lord  Melbourne  refused.  He  said, 
"  Let  your  men  of  science  find  out  the  cause  of 
the  plague  and  we  will  very  soon  put  a  stop  to  it." 
Lord  Melbourne  was  a  scoffer.  It  was  he  who 
came  away  from  a  Sunday  morning  service  once 
foaming  at  the  mouth  with  rage.  He  cursed  the 
preacher  and  said :  "  He  is  one  of  those  pesti- 
[94] 


Thy  Will  Be  Done 

lent  fellows  who  suppose  that  religion  has  to  do 
with  a  man's  private  life."  But  on  the  occasion 
of  his  reply  to  the  demand  for  national  humilia- 
tion the  scoffer  placed  himself  in  line  with  true 
Christian  devotion.  Let  us  find  the  cause  of 
pestilence,  plague,  and  penury,  of  disease,  dis- 
may, and  defeat,  and  let  us  remove  the  cause. 
Let  us  take  up  every  stumbling-block  from  the 
way  of  all  the  people  and  give  free  course  to 
health  and  wealth  and  human  joy.  And  so  with 
heroic  service  let  us  do  our  share  to  make  it  pos- 
sible that  God's  will  shall  be  done,  as  in  heaven, 
so  throughout  this  earth  of  ours. 

"  To  make  it  possible !  "  Does  the  phrase 
startle  you  ?  One  would  like  to  think  it  did. 
One  would  wish  to  believe  that  people  listen  to 
sermons  with  such  intent  and  eager  interest  that 
their  minds  are  caught  up  into  a  critical  attitude 
by  such  a  sentence.  Are  we  to  believe  that  God's 
will  is  not  done  ?  If  it  is  not,  whose  will  is  done 
in  the  world  ?  If  it  is  done,  why  go  on  praying, 
as  though  it  were  yet  to  be  sought :  Thy  will  be 
done  ?  The  dilemma  appears  grave.  Truly, 
there  is  more  in  the  Lord's  Prayer  than  we  ever 
[95] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

thought.  Its  petitions  are  not  so  simple  as  they 
look.  Are  we  to  make  it  possible,  or  even  to 
help  to  make  it  possible,  for  God's  will  to  be  done 
on  earth  as  it  is  done  in  heaven  ?  Then  what 
will  is  even  now  being  accomplished  amongst  us  ? 
Put  it  practically.  Do  you  believe  that  it  is 
God's  will  that  men  should  drink  themselves 
drunk,  be  riotous,  murderous,  and  abominable  ? 
Do  you  believe  it  is  God's  will  that  Southern 
mobs  should  pour  coal  oil  over  a  writhing  fellow 
creature,  white  or  black,  and  roast  him  at  the 
stake  ?  Do  you  believe  it  is  God's  will  that,  as 
declared  by  an  American  judge,  corruption 
should  be  found  to  be  ingrained  in  American 
public  life  and  that  forty  per  cent,  of  municipal 
expenditure  should  be  "  graft "  ?  Do  you  be- 
lieve it  is  God's  will  that  the  government  of 
American  cities  should  be,  in  President  Eliot's 
words,  "  the  worst  in  the  world  "  ?  Do  you  be- 
lieve it  is  God's  will  that  a  Leopold  should  reign 
upon  the  throne  of  Belgium  and  that  under  his 
rule,  in  the  blood-stained  forests  of  the  Upper 
Congo,  millions  of  men  and  women  and  children 
should  be  done  to  death  amid  nameless  outrages 
[96] 


Thy  Will  Be  Done 

and  agonies,  that  his  hfe  should  be  infamous  even 
amid  the  infamous  records  of  European  palaces, 
and  that,  full  of  years  and  dishonour,  outliving 
the  Psalmist's  threescore  years  and  ten,  he 
should  die  at  last  in  the  odour  of  sanctity  ?  Do 
you  believe  that  these  things  are  all  in  harmony 
with  the  will  of  God  ?  You  beheve  nothing  of 
the  kind.  All  ethical  teaching  would  be  a  farce 
and  this  prayer  would  be  a  mirthless  comedy. 

•'  And  yet,"  the  thoughtful  mind  may  argue, 
"  I  cannot  feel  that  God's  will  is  not  done.  For 
if  it  is  not,  what  remains  ?  Are  we  in  the  hands 
of  a  blind  chance  ?  Does  the  world  spring  from 
a  fortuitous  combination  of  atoms  ?  Is  man  no 
more  than  the  cunningest  of  nature's  clocks  ? 
Or  do  we  stand  in  the  presence  of  a  baffled  Christ 
and  a  triumphant  devil  ?  " 

It  is  comforting  to  be  able  to  fall  back  upon 
the  suggestions  of  great  and  inspired  men  of  the 
Bible  times.  The  prophets  undoubtedly  thought 
of  God  as  sometimes  losing  His  gracious  pur- 
poses and  being  driven  to  accept  some  alterna- 
tive and  lower  course.  Whether  you  can  accept 
their  view  or  not,  it  is  helpful  to  understand  it. 
[97] 


The  Lord's    Prayer 

They  lived  very  near  to  the  heart  of  God.  The 
author  of  the  Eighty-first  Psalm,  for  instance, 
represents  God  as  lamenting  the  waywardness  of 
the  people  and  admitting  that  because  of  it  He 
had  to  let  them  go  their  own  sinning  way,  yet 
protesting  that  if  they  would  but  hearken  to  Him 
He  would  work  out  for  them  a  golden  future : 

But  My  people  hearkened  not  to  My  voice  ; 

And  Israel  would  none  of  Me. 

So  J  let  them  go  after  the  stubbornness  of  their 

heart, 
That  they  might  walk  in  their  own  counsels. 
Ohy  that  My  people  would  hearken  utito  Me, 
That  Israel  would  walk  in  My  ways  / 
I  would  soon  subdue  their  enemies, 
And  turn  My  hand  against  their  adversaries. 

The  meaning  cannot  be  missed.  The  Psalmist 
would  not  have  it  that  it  was  God's  will  that  the 
nation  should  desert  and  forget  the  Lord.  But 
seeing  that  they  had  done  so,  God  was  driven  to 
another  and  a  different  course  from  that  which  was 
in  His  mind  towards  them  when  the  nation  was 
called  to  obey  Him.  He  would  let  them  go  their 
own  way,  follow  after  their  own  devices,  and  see 
what  came  of  it  all. 

[98] 


Thy  Will  Be  Done 

We  will  return  to  this  conception  of  God's 
providence  in  a  moment.  But  observe  that  the 
author  of  the  Eighty-first  Psalm  is  not  alone.  In 
the  time  of  Exile  we  find  Isaiah  of  Babylon  as- 
cribing similar  sentiments  and  similar  recourse  to 
God.  In  chapter  forty-eight  he  represents  God 
as  crying  to  His  people,  "  Oh,  that  thou  hadst 
hearkened  to  My  commandments !  Then  had 
thy  peace  been  as  a  river  and  thy  righteousness 
as  the  waves  of  the  sea !  "  In  plain  words,  Isaiah 
of  Babylon  thought  that  God  had  been  driven  by 
the  sins  of  the  people  to  take  a  course  different 
from  that  which  He  could  and  would  have  de- 
lighted to  take  with  a  faithful  nation.  The  sob 
and  cry  of  Jesus  weeping  over  Jerusalem  has 
echoed  in  the  souls  of  His  followers  for  nineteen 
centuries  :  "  How  often  would  I  have  gathered 
you  as  a  hen  gathers  her  brood  beneath  her 
wings  ;  but  ye  would  not !  "  The  divine  pur- 
pose was  thwarted  by  human  perversity.  Surely 
the  authority  of  Scripture  is  for  us  when  we  rea- 
son that  the  first  will  of  God  is  not  accomplished. 
What  then  ? 

It  seems  that  with  God  as  with  us  there  is  an 
[99] 


The  Lord^s  Prayer 

ideal  best  as  well  as  a  feasible  best,  a  best  pos> 
sible  under  the  circumstances.  The  ideal  best  is 
His  will.  He  wills  for  us  that  which  is  ideally, 
conceivably  the  best  of  all — the  perfect  result  is 
the  perfect  will  of  God.  But  this  ideally  best 
includes  the  freedom  of  the  human  will.  It 
would  not  be  best  that  we  should  be  so  coerced 
by  His  almightiness  as  to  act  under  compulsion 
and  not  by  free  choice.  And  in  the  exercise  of 
our  free  will  we  may  choose  badly,  wrongly, 
choose  evil  and  ensue  it.  And  it  results  that  in 
consequence  of  God's  desire  for  the  ideally  best, 
our  freedom,  we  are  able  to  choose  and  as  a 
matter  of  fact  do  choose  a  life  which  sets  His 
will  at  defiance.  Then  what  happens  and  what 
will  happen  ?  Would  it  be  good  for  us  to  know  ? 
Seeing  that  we  do  not  know  and  cannot  know, 
may  we  not  believe  that  it  is  good  for  us  that  we 
must  remain  ignorant  ?  "  Thou  art  a  God  that 
hidest  Thyself."  "  It  is  the  glory  of  God  to 
conceal  a  thing."  There  are  three  possibilities, 
and  to  the  thought  of  one  or  other  we  shall  in- 
cline according  to  temperament,  training,  and 
the  spirit  that  is  in  us. 

[100] 


Thy  Will  Be  Done 

There  is  first  the  terrible  position  of  Calvinism, 
hard  and  logical  and  relentless.  God's  will  is  done 
in  the  reprobation  and  damnation  of  the  sinner 
just  as  in  the  election  and  salvation  of  the  saint. 
We  have  said  in  our  prayers  that  the  God  of  the 
summer  days  is  the  God  of  winter's  storms  and 
snows.  We  have  said  that  the  zephyrs  of  a 
sweet  May  morning  are  not  more  the  instruments 
of  His  tenderness  than  December's  icy  blast  and 
the  tornado  that  destroys.  The  Calvinist  asks 
us  to  be  consistent.  He  builds  his  armour-plated 
system  and  defies  us  to  pierce  its  dialectic  any- 
where. God's  will,  he  asserts,  is  sovereign,  im- 
peccgikle,  irresistible  through  all  God's  universe ; 
and  if  the  sinner  is  damned  his  damnation  is  just 
and  the  will  of  God  is  done.  May  the  God  whom 
Jesus  called  Father  be  humbly  thanked  for  the 
word  of  an  ancient  sage  :  "  It  hath  not  pleased 
God  to  give  His  people  salvation  by  dialectic." 
And  let  Whittier's  voice  still  be  heard  in  the  land : 

'*  But  still  my  human  hands  are  weak 

To  hold  your  iron  creeds, 

Against  the  words  ye  bid  me  speak 

My  heart  within  me  pleads." 

[lOl] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

There  is,  secondly,  the  belief  that  the  will  of 
God  fails  of  its  first  perfect  hope,  and  that  as  He 
willed  to  make  men  free  He  has  to  content  His 
almighty  heart  while  His  ideal  will  is  thwarted 
in  the  lives  and  destiny  of  His  wayward  children. 
The  Eighty-first  Psalm,  now  to  go  back  to  it, 
says  in  effect  that  God  had  to  let  the  people 
go  their  way  and  find  out  what  would  result 
from  their  sin. 

It  is  human  experience.  Why  does  not  God 
send  an  angel  with  a  flaming  sword  to  bar  my 
path  as  I  seek  to  rush  out  from  the  Paradise  of  His 
appointing  ?  As  a  matter  of  fact,  He  seems  more 
ready  to  send  His  messengers  armed  with  the 
living  lightning  to  oppose  my  steps  when  I  seek 
to  come  to  lost  Eden  again.  Then  1  find  no 
place  of  repentance  though  I  seek  it  with  tears. 
Why  did  no  thunderbolt  strike  me  or  earthquake 
swallow  me  up  alive  rather  than  that  I  should 
have  sinned  desperately,  defiantly,  sinned  myself 
to  eternal  death  ?  Should  not  a  loving  Father 
rather  slay  His  child  than  suffer  his  soul  to  be 
corrupted  through  his  death  in  life  ?  And  then, 
though  He  slew  me,  might  I  not  trust  Him  still  ? 

[102] 


Thy  Will  Be  Done 

No  ;  it  is  not  God's  way.  The  warning  is  given, 
is  repeated,  is  reinforced  by  every  terrible  con- 
sideration from  Sinai  to  Calvary  and  by  every 
experience  of  men  and  nations.  The  almighty 
voice  goes  crashing  on  :  "  The  soul  that  sinneth 
it  shall  die,"  and  the  nation  that  will  not  obey  Him, 
God  sends  down  to  hell.  And  then — then — 
then — it  is  as  though  God  moved  aside  and  said  : 

The  way  is  open  !  Go  your  way  !  Let  him 
alone — men  and  angels,  portents  and  prophecy 
a7id  punishment,  earth  and  heaven — let  him 
alone  !  Let  him  take  his  own  course  and  eat  of 
the  fruit  of  his  ways  and  learn  in  the  black,  black 
night  what  he  would  not  learn  in  the  shining 
day  ! 

And  if  this  is  so — what  will  be  the  end  thereof? 
I  know  not.     I  can  only  pray : 

O  God,  leave  us  not  alone !  Smite,  avenge, 
slay — or  comfort,  console,  cofivince — salt  us  with 
fire,  winnow  us  with  the  tempest,  break  our  hard 
hearts  and  stubborn  wills — but  leave  us  not  alone  / 
Come  to  us  everywhere  ! 

[103] 


The  Lord^s  Prayer 

And  yet  as  I  know  that  love  does  sometimes  fail 
here,  I  wonder — oh,  I  wonder — if  love  is  to  fail 
everlastingly,  and  God's  perfect  will  to  be  baffled 
while  souls  are  for  ever  lost ! 

And  then,  in  the  third  place,  there  is  the  great 
and  wonderful  hope,  expressed  with  such  mag- 
nificent and  glorious  assurance  by  men  hke 
George  Macdonald,  profoundly  influencing  so 
much  of  our  modern  thinking,  that  God's  will 
shall  and  will  and  must  be  done.  He  willeth  not 
the  death  of  a  sinner.  It  is  not  the  will  of  your 
Father  in  heaven  that  one  of  His  little  ones 
should  perish.  His  will  shall  be  done,  and  it  is 
His  will  that  all  the  earth  should  come  to  the 
knowledge  of  the  Lord.  They  who  can  hold 
this  conviction  with  unfaltering  certainty  say  to 
the  lost — and  to  them  "  lost "  can  only  mean 
"  not  found  yet  " — "  You  must  repent  and  turn 
to  God,  you  must.  You  will  have  to  repent 
sooner  or  later,  and  if  you  leave  it  until  later, 
then  you  will  have  to  repent  of  not  repenting 
now !  Wherefore  come  to  the  arms  that  are 
open  wide  and  enter  into  the  city  by  the  gates 
which  are  never  closed  by  day,  and  there  is  no 
[104] 


Thy  Will  be  Done 

night  there  !  "  This  is  an  inspiring  hope.  Ages 
may  pass.  But  through  all  God  works  round  to 
the  point  which  all  along  He  had  in  view  and  to 
the  end  from  which  He  has  never  swerved.  This 
is  Browning's  titanic  faith  : 

"  My  own  hope  is,  a  sun  will  pierce 
The  thickest  cloud  earth  ever  stretched  ; 

That,  after  Last,  returns  the  First, 
Though  a  wide  compass  round  be  fetched  ; 

That  what  began  best,  can't  end  worst, 
Nor  what  God  blessed  once  prove  accurst." 

But  even  then,  as  you  see,  the  ideally  best  is 
not  done.  And  the  reflection  has  in  it  enough 
of  pain  for  every  one  of  us  to  drive  us  to  insistent 
prayer  and  consecrated  effort  in  order  that  the 
sins  of  men  may  every  day  become  less  and  less 
terrible,  that  indeed  and  of  a  truth  the  consum- 
mation may  one  day  be  reached  when  God's  will 
is  done,  as  in  heaven,  so  on  earth. 

So  now  consider  that  for  each  one  of  us  there 
is  the  possibility  of  harmonious  working  with 
His  will  or  of  hopeless  opposition  to  it. 

There  is  a  plan  for  our  life.  How  we  may 
[105] 


The  Lord^s  Prayer 

know  what  that  plan  is  cannot  be  told  in  a  word. 
The  method  of  discovery  is  the  burden  of  many 
a  sermon  and  many  a  prayer.  It  is  the  greater 
part  of  religion  to  discover  and  to  reveal  it.  But 
the  warning  is  clear  ;  if  you  try  to  lift  your  life 
out  of  that  plan  which  is  in  the  mind  of  God, 
nothing  but  mischief  and  misery  will  result. 
You  may  try  to  make  crooked  what  He  has 
meant  to  be  straight,  and  only  wretchedness  will 
follow.  You  may  make  of  yourself  a  painter 
when  you  were  meant  for  a  physician,  a  preacher 
when  you  were  meant  for  a  lawyer,  or  a  student 
of  literature  when  you  were  meant  for  a  man  of 
affairs,  and  all  your  nerves  for  all  your  life  will 
be  as  sweet  bells  jangled,  out  of  tune,  and  harsh. 
Try  to  take  your  Ufe  out  of  God's  hands,  to  be 
self-indulgent  when  He  means  you  to  be  self- 
sacrificing,  to  be  self-seeking  when  He  means 
you  to  seek  first  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  and  its 
righteousness,  to  follow  the  flesh  when  He  means 
you  to  live  by  the  Spirit,  to  be  a  man  or  woman 
of  the  world  when  He  means  you  to  be  a  burn- 
ing and  a  shining  light  in  the  Church  of  Christ — 
and  the  want  of  harmony  will  jar  the  framework 
[io6] 


Thy  Will  Be  Done 

of  your  life  for  ever.  Bitter  black  moments  there 
will  come  when  you  know  the  meaning  of  that 
discord.  My  brother,  my  sister,  you  are  not  in 
your  right  place.  Your  place  is  at  the  Cross,  by 
the  Open  Grave :  your  place  is  near  the  Throne 
of  God.  You  are  in  opposition.  It  is  hard  to 
kick  against  the  pricks.  Wisdom  counsels  you 
to  pray  this  prayer  :     TJiy  will  be  done. 

But,  oh,  the  joy  of  feeling  ourselves  one  with 
the  eternal  order !  Oh,  the  bliss  of  an  immovable 
confidence  that  all  is  weU  wiftfi  us  Decause  wc  are 
where  God  would  hav^i;  us  stand,  and  are  becom- 
ing what  He  would  have  us  be !  This  is  peace. 
Plans  an*,  made  for  us  ;  we  need  not  be  anxious. 
A  place  for  us  is  secure ;  we  need  not  rush  and 
scramble.  The  future  is  safe — what  shall  we 
fear?  This  is  purity.  This  is  hoHness.  Life 
naturally,  of  itself,  without  conscious  effort, 
stress,  and  strain,  grows  sweeter  and  truer  and 
lovelier,  as  day  by  day  we  find  ourselves  in 
harmony  with  the  pure  and  holy  will  of  God. 
And  this  is  power.  "  I  am  not  anxious,"  de- 
clared Lincoln  when  a  friend  said  he  hoped  that 
God  would  be  with  them,  "  I  am  not  anxious  that 
[107] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

God  should  be  on  our  side ;  I  am  only  concerned 
that  we  should  be  on  the  side  of  God."  Let  the 
weakest  amongst  us  be  sure  of  that  one  fact,  that 
we  are  on  the  side  of  God,  and  strength  is  not 
far  to  seek.  Life  grows  in  wholeness,  complete- 
ness, in  robust  and  mighty  strength.  We  con- 
fess our  weakness,  the  imperfection  of  our  plans, 
our  limited  conceptions  and  attainments  ;  but  as- 
sured that  we  are  on  the  side  of  God  an  unknown 
force  is  ours.  We  go  from  strength  to  strength. 
The  clouds  we  so  much  dread  turn  to  solid  rock 
beneath  our  feet.  And  still  we  climb  and  climb- 
ing still  achieve,  for  our  will  is  as  the  will  of 
God,  and  our  life  is  in  the  prayer,  a  prayer 
which,  when  truly  offered,  tends  to  fulfill  itself : 
Thy  will  be  done,  as  in  heaven,  so  on  earth. 


[108] 


V 


Give  Us  This  Day  Our  Daily 
Bread 


God  is  a  kind  Father.  He  sets  us  all  in  the  places  where 
He  wishes  us  to  be  employed ;  and  that  employment  is  truly 
our  Father's  business.  He  chooses  work  for  all  His  creatures 
which  will  be  delightful  to  them,  if  they  do  it  simply  and 
humbly.  He  gives  us  always  strength  enough  and  sense 
enough  for  what  He  wants  us  to  do.  If  we  either  tire  our. 
selves  or  puzzle  ourselves,  it  is  our  own  fault.  And  we  may 
always  be  sure,  whatever  we  are  doing,  that  we  cannot  be 
pleasing  Him  if  we  are  not  happy  ourselves. — John  Ruskin. 


V 

GIVE  US  THIS  DAY  OUR  DAILY  BREAD 

WHAT  meaning  do  you  attach  to  the 
word  "  daily  "  ?  For  what  is  it  that 
you  ask,  exactly,  when  you  pray, 
Give  us  this  day  our  daily  bread?  What  is 
"  daily  bread  "  ? 

If  you  mean  to  ask  for  a  supply  this  day  suf- 
ficient for  the  needs  of  this  day — to-morrow's 
necessities  being  left  to  be  provided  for  when  to- 
morrow is  here  and  has  become  to-day — why, 
you  have  probably  come  to  the  heart  of  this 
prayer  as  our  Lord  taught  it  and  meant  us  to 
use  it.  If  the  phrase  means  this  to  you  we  must 
say  that  it  is  a  good  phrase,  and  continue  to  employ 
it.  But  the  word  of  which  it  is  supposed  to  be  a 
translation  has  been  the  torture  of  theologians 
and  expositors.  Probably  the  meaning  of  the 
petition  is  precisely  what  you  suppose — daily 
supply  for  daily  needs,  daily  strength  for  daily 
living.  But  what  is  the  exact  meaning  of  the 
word  itself  nobody  knows. 
[Ill] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

The  word  is  a  coined  word.  It  is  not  found 
elsewhere  in  the  New  Testament.  It  is  not 
found  in  the  Greek  translation  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment. It  is  not  found  in  Greek  Hterature. 
Origen,  less  than  two  hundred  years  after  our 
Lord  spoke,  reported  that  he  could  not  find  the 
word  either  in  the  works  of  classical  writers  or  in 
the  common  speech  of  the  uneducated.  It  is  not 
likely  that  in  this  prayer,  intended  by  our  Lord 
to  be  a  model  for  His  disciples.  He  would  in- 
troduce an  unknown  word  manufactured  by  Him 
for  the  occasion.  It  looks  as  though  our  Lord 
had  indeed  spoken  in  Aramaic,  and  that  when 
the  evangelists  began  to  write  their  Gospels  in 
Greek  they  coined  this  word  to  represent  what 
Jesus  said.  So  puzzled  were  the  great  men  of 
the  early  Church  that  Jerome  actually  made  it 
read  "  supersubstantial  bread  " — a  reading  admi- 
rably calculated  to  prevent  anybody  ever  offering 
the  prayer  again.  Think  of  teaching  your  child 
to  pray :  "  Give  us  this  day  our  supersubstantial 
bread  ! "  And  Jerome  explained  that  "  super- 
substantial  bread  "  referred  to  Jesus  Christ  Him- 
self, who  is  called  in  Scripture  the  Bread  of  Life, 

[112] 


Give  Us  This  Day  Our  Daily  Bread 

the  true  bread  which  came  down  from  heaven — 
so  taking  out  of  the  prayer  all  its  sweet  simplicity, 
all  its  childlike  reliance  upon  God's  gracious  care 
for  us.  Tertullian,  Cyril,  Athanasius,  Ambrose, 
Augustine — what  names  are  these ! — all  taught 
that  the  bread  referred  to  is  spiritual,  and  that  the 
prayer  has  no  reference  to  our  physical  needs. 
One  cannot  be  too  grateful,  in  the  presence  of 
such  aberrations  of  judgment,  for  the  grim  re- 
mark of  John  Bright  about  John  Stuart  Mill, 
that  "  the  worst  of  these  great  thinkers  is  that 
they  so  often  think  wrong."  Erasmus  thought 
that  a  reference  to  physical  food  would  be  out  of 
place  in  so  heavenly  a  prayer ;  and  there  are 
modern  teachers  who  are  as  positive  as  he  was  that 
the  reference  is  purely  spiritual.  Alas,  how  ready 
we  always  are  to  refine  away  the  direct  and  beauti- 
ful intimacies  of  God's  dealings  with  us,  and  to 
substitute  for  them  theological  quibbles,  transcen- 
dental imaginings,  and  cobweb  follies  that  come 
from  nowhere  and  lead  in  the  same  direction ! 
The  phrase  "  daily  bread  "  comes  to  us  from  the 
Latin ;  it  was  adopted  by  Tyndale  and  by  Luther, 
and  so  passed  into  King  James'  Version.     It  was 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

adopted,  says  the  historian,  "  in  a  kind  of  critical 
despair  " — let  us  say  in  a  moment  of  inspiration, 
by  a  flight  of  genius.  And  let  us  cherish  all  the 
lovely  hope  and  confidence  which  it  represents. 
"  Prayer  for  the  oncoming  day "  is  perhaps  as 
good  a  literal  rendering  as  we  could  make,  and 
so  we  will  pray  for  supply  just  for  the  day  before 
us,  and  here  as  elsewhere  it  shall  be  "  one  step 
enough  for  me."  The  petition,  as  it  appears  in 
Luke's  Gospel,  with  its  magnificent  redundancy, 
its  divine  tautology  of  love  and  faith,  represents 
the  devout  attitude  of  one  who  asks,  depends, 
and  trusts  :  Give  us  day  by  day  our  daily  bread. 
We  are  told  that  family  prayers  are  a  thing  of 
the  past.  The  proportion  of  homes  in  this  city 
in  which  the  day  begins  with  the  reading  of  Scrip- 
ture and  the  invocation  of  God's  blessing  must 
be  infinitesimally  small.  We  are  told  that  the 
conditions  of  modern  city  life  make  such  a  prac- 
tice physically  impossible.  If  that  is  true,  the 
advice  of  Gladstone  to  his  son  at  Oxford  has  still 
more  point :  "  It  is  not  difficult,  it  is  most  bene- 
ficial, to  cultivate  the  habit  of  inwardly  turning 
the  thoughts  to  God,  though  but  for  a  moment, 


Give  Us  This  Day  Our  Daily  Bread 

in  the  course  of  or  during  the  intervals  of  our 
business ;  which  continually  presents  occasions 
requiring  His  aid  and  guidance."  Suppose  we 
formed  this  habit  and  held  to  it.  Suppose  we 
prayed  this  prayer,  constantly,  intelligently,  with 
the  heart  and  with  the  understanding  also — Give 
us  this  day  our  daily  bread — what  should  you  say 
would  be  involved  ? 

Well,  first  and  most  obviously,  a  disdain  of  the 
bread  which  God  does  not  give ! 

Mercury  was  the  Roman  god  who  presided 
over  barter,  trade,  and  all  commercial  enterprise. 
There  is  a  Latin  word  formed  from  his  name 
which  is  the  equivalent  of  our  word  "  cheat."  The 
Roman  merchant  sprinkled  himself  with  water 
from  a  laurel  leaf  before  the  altar  of  Mercury,  and 
entreated  that  complacent  god  to  look  with  indul- 
gence upon  whatever  false  measures  the  trades- 
man had  found  it  expedient  to  use  in  the  pursuit 
of  wealth.  When  the  Pagan  wished  to  pray, 
"  God  bless  our  cheating,"  he  came  to  Mercury. 
You  cannot  bring  such  prayers  to  the  God  and 
Father  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ.  He  is  of  too 
pure  eyes  to  behold  iniquity.     If  you  are  to  pray 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

to  our  God,  Give  us  this  day  our  daily  bread,  you 
must  not  at  the  same  time  think  to  accept  the 
gifts  of  low  and  mean  deities.  You  cannot  wor- 
ship the  Living  God  and  at  the  same  time  bow 
before  the  "  Goddess  of  Getting-On  "  and  ask  her 
aid  in  escaping  from  what  Carlyle  called  "  the 
hell  of  the  English,"  which  is  equally  the  hell  of 
New  York,  viz :  the  fear  of  not  making  enough 
money  or  not  making  it  quick  enough,  and  sac- 
rifice at  her  altar  your  dignity,  your  self-respect» 
your  reverence  for  the  old-fashioned  virtues  of 
honesty,  truth,  and  regard  for  your  fellow  man. 

How  splendid  it  would  be  if  you  could  get 
back  to  the  pious  idea  which  lies  behind  the  word 
"  calling  "  as  a  synonym  for  your  trade,  your 
profession,  your  business  in  life  !  It  is  a  calling 
— something  to  which  you  are  called  as  truly  as 
the  preacher  to  his  Gospel  message  and  the  mis- 
sionary to  the  tribes  who  sit  in  darkness  and  the 
shadow  of  death.  Your  business  is  a  great  and 
sacred  thing.  It  is  meant  to  add  to  the  wealth 
of  this  old  earth  and  to  the  comfort  of  God's  chil- 
dren. It  is  meant  to  increase  from  day  to  day 
the  sum  total  of  human  happiness.  It  is  in- 
[ii6] 


Give  Us  This  Day  Our  Daily  Bread 

tended  to  bring  the  most  widely  scattered  of 
peoples,  divided  by  oceans  and  continents,  by 
race,  nationality,  language,  religion,  and  social 
custom,  into  fellowship  and  friendship.  It  is 
meant  to  level  mountains  and  bridge  rivers — to 
level  to  the  dust,  that  is  to  say,  all  barriers  that  rise 
between  nations  and  dry  up  all  the  jealousies  and 
passions  which  flood  our  human  hearts.  The 
Jew  hated  the  sea,  and  the  aged  prisoner  on 
Patmos  thought  of  it  as  something  that  separated 
nation  from  nation.  He  looked  forward  to  a 
time  when  there  should  be  no  more  jealousy, 
suspicion,  or  distrust  between  the  peoples  of  the 
earth,  and  so  he  said,  "  and  the  sea  is  no  more." 
We  do  not  hate  the  sea.  And  we  think  of  it  now 
as  a  means  of  communication.  It  is  our  high- 
way, and  the  nations  travel  along"'it  fearlessly  one 
to  the  other.  Will  you  think  of  your  trade,  your 
business,  to-morrow's  toil  by  which  you  live,  in 
this  way  ?  It  is  an  endless  chain  of  influences 
and  activities  which  bring  people  together.  Its 
object  is  mutual  satisfaction,  mutual  comfort, 
mutual  help.  In  your  office  you  are  not  work- 
ing for  yourself  and  your  family  alone :  you  are 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

forging  from  material  things  spiritual  links  which 
bind  hearts  and  peoples  together. 

It  is  easy  to  be  cynical.  You  think  it  is 
clever.  Perhaps  it  is  simply  foolish.  God  and 
the  ages  and  eternity  shall  judge.  You  are  say- 
ing, "  That  is  not  a  view  of  my  business  which 
ever  occurred  to  me,  and  it  is  not  a  view  which 
would  occur  to  anybody  who  had  to  sit  at  my 
desk,  meet  my  competitors,  repel  the  attacks 
which  are  made  on  me,  and  protect  the  interests 
which  are  properly  my  care.  Let  the  other  man 
look  after  himself.  I  have  enough  to  do  to  look 
after  myself."  All  very  simple  and  straightfor- 
ward, no  doubt.  But  into  what  name  were  you 
baptized,  his,  whom  the  thieves  of  Rome  honoured, 
or  that  of  Him  who  died  upon  a  cross  ? 

Put  it  to  yourself  as  a  question.  Would  the 
world  be  a  better  place  if  you  and  people  like 
you  took  a  low  view  or  a  high  view  of  business, 
its  responsibilities  and  possibilities  ?  If  the  New 
Testament  view  could  be  taken  and  acted  upon, 
would  life  be  sweeter  and  happier  than  it  is? 
Then,  as  you  have  named  the  name  of  Christ,  as 
far  as  in  you  hes,  why  should  you  not  brace 
[ii8] 


Give  Us  This  Day  Our  Daily  Bread 

yourself  to  disdain  with  heroic  fortitude  mercuri' 
alls — the  Roman  word  for  cheating,  but  you  may 
call  it  by  any  name  which  competition  and  the 
pressure  of  modern  enterprise  have  invented — 
why  should  you  not  heroically  disdain  the  gifts  of 
Mercury  and  seek  only  those  which  our  God  may 
bestow  in  answer  to  our  prayer :  Give  us  this  day 
our  daily  bread? 

One  need  not  make  light  of  the  difficulties. 
They  are  real  and  great.  Moreover,  there  is  no 
promise  that  they  will  grow  less  and  less  oppress- 
ive in  the  near  future.  Competition  will  grow 
keener,  and  the  pressure  upon  your  children  will 
be  greater  than  it  is  upon  you.  Yet  this  ques- 
tion stands :  Would  life  grow  harder  or  easier 
if  we  prayed  this  prayer  and  lived  in  the  child- 
like confidence  in  our  Father's  care  which  it  im- 
plies ?  Let  the  answer  be  practical,  the  re- 
sult of  our  analysis  of  those  elements  of  modern 
life  which  constitute  the  pressure  of  our  days. 

This  pressure  is  not  created  by  the  toil  for 
bread  but  by  the  strife  for  more  than  bread. 
That  is  to  say,  the  difficulty  is  not  in  securing  for 
all  mankind  the  necessaries  of  life.    The  difficulty 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

comes  from  aggrandizement,  avarice,  and  colossal 
selfishness.  The  difficulty  comes  from  the  be- 
lief which  we  have  fastened  upon  ourselves  that 
vast  superfluities  are  necessaries  and  from  the 
fact  that  our  belief  that  they  are  necessary  has 
made  them  so.  And  yet  it  is  bad  psychology — 
it  is  a  poor,  mean,  stunted  view  of  human 
nature — which  says  that  human  selfishness  is  the 
originating  passion  in  the  strife  of  our  day.  It 
is  a  development,  not  a  primary  cause.  The 
real,  first  cause  is  not  desire  for  wealth  but  fear 
of  poverty.  It  is  not  anxiety  to  be  rich  but 
terror  of  being  poor.  A  man  feels  himself 
driven  into  the  battle  by  necessity.  He  believes 
that  all  is  a  terrific  fight  and  that  he  must  either 
kill  or  be  killed.  Naturally,  he  prefers  not  to  be 
killed.  So  he  fights  tooth  and  nail  and  claw  for 
daily  bread,  for  position,  and  for  security.  Then 
he  finds  that  he  must  still  fight  tooth  and  nail 
and  claw  to  keep  the  place  which  he  has  won 
and  maintain  for  even  twenty-four  hours  the 
security  for  which  the  conflict  was  waged.  So 
he  sets  in  motion  a  thousand  activities,  taking  to 
himself  weapons  of  offense  and  defense ;  and  so 

[I20] 


Give  Us  This  Day  Our  Daily  Bread 

the  war  goes  on.  The  strong  successful  man 
likes  it.  It  appeals  to  the  fighting  instinct  which 
he  has  brought  up  from  our  animal  ancestry,  and 
it  appeals  as  well  to  the  masterly  intellect,  the 
genius  for  organization  and  administration  and 
command  which  the  ages  have  developed  in  him. 
And  it  becomes  so  much  a  part  of  his  second 
nature  that  when  he  puts  the  armour  off  and  lays 
down  the  sword  he — dies  !  But  meanwhile  his 
tremendous  operations  are  increasing  the  pres- 
sure because  heightening  the  fear  of  others  who 
so  are  forced  into  the  conflict. 

Well,  now,  what  is  your  answer  to  the  ques- 
tion :  Would  life  grow  harder  or  easier  if  we 
prayed  this  prayer  and  lived  in  the  spirit  which 
it  breathes?  Suppose  that  paralyzing  terror 
lifted  from  our  souls  :  suppose  that  we  had  no 
fear  as  to  the  daily  supply  of  daily  needs  :  sup- 
pose we  felt  that  industry,  intelligence,  probity, 
would  have  their  reward,  that  our  bread  should 
be  certain  and  our  water  sure  :  suppose  we  could 
be  calm  in  the  confidence  that  while  we  do  our 
share  diligently,  wisely,  honestly,  God,  as  a  lov- 
ing Father,  will  assure  the  comfort  of  His  chil- 

[121] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

dren  and  give  all  that  is  necessary  for  their  hap- 
piness and  usefulness — you  know  whether  life 
would  grow  harder  or  easier  for  mankind. 

And  it  is  this  spirit  of  which  the  prayer  is  full. 
It  is  useless  to  say  that  in  our  day  people  can- 
not live  in  harmony  with  it.  MiUions  of  people 
are  living  in  harmony  with  it.  Idleness  is  not 
taught.  Recklessness  is  not  enjoined.  You  are 
not  to  ask  of  God  what  God  expects  you  to  do 
for  yourselves.  But  oh  !  the  bliss  of  feeling  that 
fear  is  monstrously  out  of  place,  that  God  is  the 
All-Father  who  cares  for  His  children,  and  that 
His  children  can  trust  His  unfailing  providence  ! 
Reject  the  fruits  of  dishonesty ;  seek  the  bread 
which  your  Father  gives  and  strive  for  none 
which  your  Father  has  not  blessed ;  and  to  the 
limit  alike  of  your  influence  and  your  responsibil- 
ity you  have  prepared  for  the  dawn  of  a  sweeter, 
gentler,  nobler  life  upon  this  earth  when  all  God's 
children  shall  live  in  the  sacredness  of  love  and 
trust,  the  love  and  trust  of  this  childlike  prayer  : 
Give  us  this  day  our  daily  bread. 

Very  wonderful  is  the  place  of  this  prayer.  It 
is  preceded  by  the  petition,  Thy  will  be  dojie,  as 

[122] 


Give  Us  This  Day  Our  Daily  Bread 

in  heave?i,  so  on  earth.  It  is  followed  by,  For- 
give us  our  debts,  as  we  forgive  our  debtors. 
That  is  to  say,  it  comes  between  the  deepest 
prayer  of  faith  and  the  deepest  prayer  of  penitence. 
When  the  significance  of  this  is  fully  grasped 
one  of  two  things  will  happen.  Either,  like 
Erasmus  already  quoted,  we  shall  say  that  such  a 
mundane  petition  is  out  of  place  in  this  so 
heavenly  prayer,  or  else  we  shall  realize  as  we 
never  have  done  before  God's  interest  in  us.  This 
is  the  God  who  cares  for  the  sparrows,  oh,  ye  of 
little  faith.  This  is  He  of  whom  Jesus  says, 
What  man  is  there  of  you  who,  if  his  son  shall  ask 
him  for  a  loaf,  will  give  him  a  stone,  or  if  he 
shall  ask  for  a  fish  will  give  him  a  serpent  ? 
And,  anticipating  the  immediate  and  universal 
negative,  "  No  father  who  deserved  to  be  a  father 
could  do  such  a  thing,"  goes  on,Ifye  then — being 
what  you  are — know  how  to  give  good  gifts  unto 
your  children,  how  much  more  shall  your  Father 
in  heaven  give  good  gifts  to  them  that  ask  Him  f 
Here  is  no  need  for  stated  forms  of  worship,  costly 
ceremonial,  and  the  pride  and  pomp  of  ritual. 
God's  interest  in  us  is  direct,  immediate,  and  inti- 
[  123] 


The  Lord's    Prayer 

mate.     We  are  to  speak  to   Him  of  our  daily 
needs,  and  He  will  listen  to  His  children's  cry. 

The  child-spirit  represents  the  true  relation  of 
each  one  of  us  to  God.  There  are  unruly,  un- 
dutiful,  ungracious  children,  and  such  too  often 
are  we.  But  the  spirit  of  ideal  childhood  is  the 
spirit  of  the  ideal  relation  of  each  human  soul 
to  God.  We  are  not  to  think  of  Him  as  "  a 
stream  of  tendency  not  ourselves  which  makes 
for  righteousness,"  nor  as  "the  first  great 
cause,"  nor  as  "  the  resident  force  of  the 
universe."  We  shall  not  even  be  most  helped 
by  thinking  of  Him  chiefly  as  the  Creator 
of  the  heavens  and  the  earth  or  as  the  Judge 
of  the  living  and  the  dead.  We  may  not 
think  of  Him  as  a  dark,  inscrutable,  though 
majestic  Power  before  whom  we  all  must  bend 
in  lowliness  and  awe.  We  are  to  think  of  Him 
as  care-free,  happy,  innocent,  and  sweet-natured 
children  think  of  father  or  mother  who  stands  to 
the  child's  mind  for  perfect  goodness  and  unfailing 
tenderness.  Hymns,  prayers,  sermons,  creeds, 
definitions,  churches  which  obscure  or  harden 
this  conception  of  God  and  tend  to  make  of  Him 


Give  Us  This  Day  Our  Daily  Bread 

a  more  distant  Deity,  violate  the  first  require- 
ment of  religion.  The  words  of  our  Lord  stand 
sure,  Whosoever  shall  not  receive  the  Kuigdom  of 
Heaven  as  a  little  cJiild,  he  shall  i?i  nowise  enter 
therein.  And  the  stoutest  of  saints,  finding  stern 
work  to  do  in  this  busy,  bustling  world  of  ours, 
will  add  vigour  to  his  heart  and  heroic  endur- 
ance to  his  soul  in  proportion  as  he  receives  the 
kingdom  in  the  spirit  of  ideal  childhood  and 
trusts  his  Father,  God. 

Now  it  came  to  pass  that  Jesus  had  been 
crucified,  and  the  hearts  of  the  disciples  were 
heavy  within  them.  There  were  present  Simon 
Peter,  Thomas,  Nathanael,  the  sons  of  Zebedee, 
and  two  other  disciples.  And  Simon  Peter 
verily  thought  within  himself  that  the  dream  of 
a  Kingdom  of  Heaven  on  earth  was  past  and 
gone,  and  he  saith  unto  them,  "  I  go  a-fishing." 
They  say  unto  him,  "  We  also  come  with  thee." 
They  went  forth  and  that  night  they  took  noth- 
ing. But  when  day  was  breaking,  Jesus  stood 
on  the  beach,  yet  the  disciples  knew  not  that  it 
was  Jesus.  When  he  whom  Jesus  loved  and  who 
lived  to  tell  the  story  said  unto  Peter,  "  It  is  the 
[125] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

Lord,"  that  brave,  weather-battered  man  girt 
his  fisherman's  coat  about  him  and  flung  himself 
into  the  surf  and  battled  to  his  Master's  side. 
And  the  other  disciples  followed,  and  in  the 
gray  light  of  the  Galilean  morning  they  per- 
ceived that  it  was  Christ.  And  this  was  after 
the  agonizing  scenes  on  Calvary  which  had 
caused  their  souls  to  melt  as  water,  after  the  sun 
had  been  darkened  in  the  heavens,  the  rocks  had 
been  rent  and  the  graves  had  given  up  their 
dead !  This  was  after  the  seal  had  been  placed 
upon  the  tomb  and  the  watch  set.  Then  this  was 
the  risen  and  glorified  Christ  who  had  said  of  Him- 
self, /  am  the  Resurrection  and  the  Life !  And 
He,  no  longer  thorn-crowned  and  shamefully  en- 
treated, but  clothed  with  light  as  with  a  garment 
and  crowned  as  with  the  sun  in  heaven,  what 
had  He  done  while  He  walked  the  shore  and 
waited  for  the  dawning  of  the  morning?  Oh, 
the  wonder  of  it,  the  unspeakable,  incredible 
marvel  of  it — He  had  gathered  the  coals,  laid 
the  fuel,  made  the  fire,  cooked  the  fish,  broken 
the  bread,  and  now  He  says  to  them,  Children^ 
come  and  break  your  fast!  The  Christ  does 
[126] 


Give  Us  This  Day  Our  Daily  Bread 

this,  the  risen  Christ,  the  Christ  glorified, 
triumphant!  He  stoops  to  manual  toil;  He 
busies  Himself  with  kitchen  deeds.  He  thinks 
of  His  friends,  toiling  in  rowing,  disappointed 
and  hungry — Children,  come  atid  break  your 
fast! 

Who  shall  say  how  much  of  this  story  is  fact 
and  how  much  fancy?  Who  shall  say  how 
much  of  it  the  author  of  John's  Gospel  means  us 
to  take  as  plain  prose  and  how  much  is  divine, 
radiant  poetry  ?  We  only  know  that  we  do  not 
know  how  to  express  our  amazement  at  this 
conception  of  the  Christ.  And  we  ask,  What 
was  the  impression  which  Christ  made  upon  the 
hearts  of  His  disciples  when  one  of  them  could 
conceive  such  a  story  and  dare  to  hand  it  down 
to  us  ?  Here  is  no  forensic  Christ  of  the  Creeds, 
no  ecclesiastical  Christ  of  Church  fiction.  Here 
is  the  tender  human  Christ,  the  brother  of  us  all. 
Nineteen  centuries  have  rolled  away.  What  the 
first  century  meant  for  parable  we  may  take  for 
crude  fact,  or  what  it  believed  as  fact  we  may  re- 
fine away  into  imagery  and  dream.  But  still  we 
hear  the  words  of  Christ  our  Lord,  Children, 
[127] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

come  and  break  your  fast !  And  taught  by  such 
a  Saviour  we  can  begin  to  pray  again  our  child- 
hood's prayer,  Our  Father,  ivho  art  in  heaven; 
give  us  this  day  our  daily  bread. 


[128] 


VI 


Forgive    Us    Our   Dehts^  As    We 

Also  Have  Forgiven  Our 

Debtors 


Thou  bringest  all  again ;  with  Thee 
Is  light,  is  space,  is  breadth,  and  room 
For  each  thing  fair,  beloved,  and  free, 
To  have  its  hour  of  life  and  bloom. 

Each  heart's  deep  instinct  unconfess'd ; 
Each  lowly  wish,  each  daring  claim ; 
All,  all  that  life  hath  long  repress'd, 
Unfolds,  undreading  blight  or  blame. 

Thy  reign  eternal  will  not  cease  ; 
Thy  years  are  sure,  and  glad,  and  slow ; 
Within  Thy  mighty  world  of  peace 
The  humblest  flower  hath  leave  to  blow. 

— Dora  Greenwdl. 


VI 

FORGIVE  US  OUR  DEBTS,  AS  WE  ALSO 
HAVE  FORGIVEN  OUR  DEBTORS 

«  y^EBTS"  or  "Sins"— it  is  "debts" 
I  M  ^^  Matthew's  Gospel  and  "  sins  "  in 
"^"^^  the  version  of  the  prayer  preserved 
by  Luke.  The  "  New  Testament  in  Modern 
Speech "  makes  the  petition  run,  "  Forgive  us 
our  shortcomings,  as  we  also  have  forgiven  those 
who  have  failed  in  their  duty  towards  us."  But  a 
discussion  of  the  proper  word  by  which  the 
offense  should  be  described  would  be  trivial  and 
finicking  in  the  presence  of  the  astounding  second 
clause,  "  as  we  also  have  forgiven."  The  perfect 
tense  is  used — /tave  forgiven.  And  we  seem  to 
be  taught  to  do  one  of  two  things,  either  to  lay 
the  ground  of  an  appeal  to  God  to  be  good  to  us 
in  the  fact  that  we  already  have  been  good  to 
people ;  or  else  to  measure  the  possible  goodness 
of  God  to  us  by  the  excellence  of  our  own  dis- 
position. And  is  either  of  these  courses  think- 
able? 

[131] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

This  is  not  a  new  problem  created  by  a  modern, 
critical  way  of  approaching  sacred  themes.  The 
questions  raised  by  the  prayer  are  old — probably 
as  old  as  the  prayer  itself.  The  suggestion — 
what  seems  to  be  the  suggestion — of  the  prayer 
that  we  should  base  our  plea  for  forgiveness  upon 
the  fact  that  we  forgive,  has  raised  in  the  minds 
of  devout  followers  of  Christ  a  hundred  perplexed 
and  perplexing  doubts.  A  generous,  impulsive, 
and  deeply  religious  man  is  tempted  to  exclaim  : 

"  I,  for  one,  will  not  pray  this  prayer.  I  do 
not  want  to  be  forgiven  by  God  as  I  forgive 
people  who  wrong  me.  I  want  to  be  forgiven 
in  a  larger,  grander,  fuller,  more  glorious  way. 
I  conceive  of  a  love  of  God  beyond  and  infinitely 
and  for  ever  above  all  human  love  with  which 
I  might  presume  to  compare  it.  And  I  conceive 
of  a  forgiveness  of  God  so  spontaneous,  full,  and 
free,  so  perfect,  so  divine,  that  the  attempt  to 
compare  it  with  my  poor  limited  human  forgive- 
ness borders  on  profanity.  And  if  the  question 
of  the  quantity  or  the  quality  of  forgiveness  does 
not  arise,  and  the  conditioning  words  only  refer 
to  the  fact ;  if  I  am  asked  to  pray  for  forgiveness 
[  132] 


Forgive   Us  Our  Debts 

from  God  because  I  have  already  forgiven  the 
one  who  has  transgressed  against  me,  then  I 
flatly  decline.  I  do  not  care  to  accept  much  less 
to  plead  for  a  boon  from  the  hands  of  a  deity 
whose  boon  is  withheld  until  a  sinning  man  like 
me  sets  the  example  of  magnanimity.  I  conceive 
of  a  God  whose  first  best  name  is  love,  a  God 
whom  Jesus  bids  us  approach  with  the  words  of 
tender  affection  on  our  lips, '  Our  Father,'  a  God 
who  gives  and  loves  to  give.  I  conceive  of  a 
God  who  is  mindful  of  me  when  I  forget  Him, 
who  takes  care  of  me  when  I  am  reckless  of  my- 
self, who,  as  often  as  I  wander  away  from  Him, 
tries  to  draw  me  back  to  Himself.  And  I  refuse 
to  offer  a  prayer  which  is  dishonouring  to  Him. 
My  God,  the  God  and  Father  of  our  Lord  Jesus 
Christ,  will  not  wait  to  bless  me  until  I  myself 
have  risen  to  heroic  heights.  His  mercy  is  over 
all  His  works." 

It  must  be  admitted  that  there  is  force  in  the 
objection.  Is  God's  goodness  no  greater  than 
ours?  Is  the  human  heart  the  measure  of  divine 
beneficence  ?  Does  God's  impulse  of  mercy  wait 
the  motion  of  our  own  ?  Must  we  be  good  be- 
[  133] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

fore  He  will  be  ?  We  agree  that  amongst  men 
and  women  it  is  a  poor  kind  of  person  who 
makes  his  right-doing  depend  on  that  of  some 
one  else.  We  often  see  an  individual  who 
finds  an  excuse  for  his  own  moral  downfall  in 
the  failure  of  another  to  live  up  to  his  ideals. 
We  see  it,  but  we  never  admire  it.  Occasionally 
we  pity,  often  we  despise  such  a  man.  We  hear 
the  remark,  "  Such  and  such  a  one  would  drive 
me  away  from  religion  altogether,"  though 
why  you  should  be  bad  because  some  other 
person  is  not  good  is  a  question  you  have  never 
yet  tried  to  answer.  You  are  responsible  for 
yourself.  It  is  no  answer  to  the  charge  that  you 
have  come  short  of  the  promise  of  your  young 
manhood  or  womanhood  to  say  that  your  neigh- 
bour was  no  better  than  he  should  be.  Then  how 
much  of  this  holds  true  of  God  and  His  relations 
with  us  ?  If  it  is  wrong  for  us  to  wait  to  be  good 
until  some  one  else  is  good,  why  is  it  right  for 
God  ?  While  God  is  God,  can  He  be  content  to 
keep  back  the  gifts  of  His  grace  until  I  am 
gracious  ?  Will  He  really  wait  for  me  to  forgive 
before  He  will  show  Himself  forgiving  ?  It  is 
[134] 


F 0  7^ give    Us   Our  Debts 

hard  to  believe  that  this  is  the  meaning  of  the 
prayer. 

We  call  to  mind  the  utterances  of  Scripture  in 
which  we  delight.  The  mighty  voice  of  the 
Hebrew  prophet  thrills  our  very  souls.  He  is 
speaking  as  the  mouthpiece  of  the  living  God 
and  he  says,  /,  even  I,  am  He,  who  blotteth  out 
thy  transgressions  for  Mine  own  sake — for  Mine 
own  sake — and  I  will  not  remember  thy  sins. 
Again,  the  rapt,  ecstatic  seer  beholds  God  as  a 
loving  husband  pleading  with  the  young  wife 
estranged  and  hurt.  And  it  is  God  who  is  will- 
ing to  take  upon  Himself  the  reproach  of  the 
estrangement.  It  is  the  wife  who  is  forsaken 
and  grieved  in  spirit,  even  a  young  wife  cast  off, 
saith  the  Lord.  And  the  tender  plaint  goes  on, 
confessing  the  momentary  alienation  of  God's 
love  and  pledging  eternal  protecting  tenderness 
and  devotion :  For  a  small  moment  have  I 
forsaken  thee :  but  with  great  mercies  will  I 
gather  thee.  In  overflowing  wrath  I  hid  My 
face  before  thee,  but  with  everlasting  loving- 
kindness  will  I  have  mercy  upon  thee,  saith  the 
Lord  thy  Redeemer. 

[135] 


The  Liord^s  Prayer 

These  declarations  of  "  Isaiah  "  are  wonderful. 
They  are  wonderful  to  us  because  they  endeavour 
to  set  forth  in  human  speech  the  "  marvellous 
loving-kindness  of  our  God,"  to  embody  in  con- 
crete images  the  height  and  depth  and  length 
and  breadth  of  the  unspeakable  love  of  God. 
'« Shall  I  forgive  my  brother  seven  times  if  he  sin 
against  me  ?  "  one  asked  of  our  Lord  ;  and  the 
answer  was,  "  Yea,  and  unto  seventy  times 
seven."  And  in  mood  as  amazed  and  baffled 
one  may  ask  again,  and  as  reverently.  Shall  I  for- 
give seventy  times  seven,  freely,  without  limit, 
bargain,  or  condition,  while  God  Almighty  waits 
for  the  wrong-doer  to  come  to  terms  before  He 
will  forgive  once  ?  It  cannot  be  thought,  we  are 
ready  to  say,  or  if  it  can  we  must  cease  to  sing — 


For  the  love  of  God  is  broader 
Than  the  measures  of  man's  mind, 

And  the  heart  of  the  Eternal 
Is  most  wonderfully  kind. 

It  is  clear  that  we  need  to  have  this  prayer  ex- 
plained to  us.     And,  to  go  back  to  our  objector, 
[136] 


Forgive    Us  Our  Debts 


when  the  puzzled  but  yet  devout  soul  says,  "  I 
want  a  forgiveness  from  God  which  is  uncon- 
ditioned by  my  own,  a  forgiveness  from  Him 
which  does  not  depend  on  my  state  of  soul,"  the 
proper  answer  is,  "  You  cannot  have  it.  In  the 
nature  of  the  case  you  cannot  have  it.  And 
your  demand  for  it  proves  that  you  do  not  know 
what  forgiveness  is  !  " 

Nine-tenths  of  the  difficulty  and  misunder- 
standing arise  from  the  confusion  in  our  minds 
of  two  vastly  different  ideas — forgiveness  of  sin 
and  remission  of  penalty.  Men  of  spiritual 
vision,  the  prophets,  the  New  Testament  writers, 
and  our  Lord  speak  of  the  forgiveness  of  sin. 
We  think  of  the  remission  of  penalty.  Misun- 
derstanding is  bound  to  result  when  they  speak 
of  one  thing  and  we  think  of  another.  And  the 
confusion  is  worse  confounded  when  we  use  the 
word  "  forgiveness  "  to  mean  what  it  does  not 
and  cannot  mean,  escape  from  the  penal  conse- 
quences of  wrong-doing. 

The  very  words  which  we  use  condemn  us. 
The  dictionary  is  not  always  a  safe  guide  in 
theological  discussions  and  in  the  deeper  things 
[137] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

of  the  spirit.  But  two  minutes  spent  with  the 
"  Standard  Dictionary "  would  have  saved  us 
years  of  bewilderment.  To  *'  forgive,"  we  are 
told,  is  first  of  all  "  to  cease  to  cherish  displeasure 
towards,"  and  only  afterwards  in  common  speech 
is  it  used  for  something  different.  It  is  the  word 
"  pardon  "  to  which  the  meaning  attaches  "  to 
remit  the  penalty."  To  the  precise  thinker  these 
differences  are  clear,  for,  still  in  the  language  of 
the  dictionary,  «*  Forgive  has  reference  to  feel- 
ings, pardon  to  consequences  ;  hence,  the  execu- 
tive may  pardon^  but  has  nothing  to  do  officially 
with  forgiving."  Yet  what  we  want,  generally, 
is  pardon,  and  that  which  we  ask  for,  forgive- 
ness, we  care  very  little  about!  We  pray  for 
"  forgiveness  "  :  we  want  to  be  "  let  off."  The 
word  we  use  points  to  a  state  of  soul  and  the 
energies  at  work  upon  and  within  the  soul.  The 
thing  we  desire  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  soul 
and  persistently  ignores  the  existence  of  the  soul. 
That  which  we  crave  is  escape  from  material  and 
physical  misery. 

Most  of  us  have  read  at  one  time  or  another 
distressing  letters  written  by  a  murderer  within  a 
[138] 


Forgive   Us  Our  Debts 

very  short  time  of  the  execution  upon  him  of 
the  death  penalty.  And  we  have  read  of  the 
deep  piety  of  his  conversation  with  the  prison 
chaplain  or  clergyman  who  has  visited  him. 
The  letters  have  seemed  to  us  very  dreadful,  and 
we  have  been  startled  by  the  phrases  of  conven- 
tional religion  which  have  fallen  so  glibly  from 
his  lips.  They  have  seemed  to  us  gross,  maud- 
lin, almost  repulsive.  Less  than  two  years  ago 
in  this  State  there  was  such  a  case,  and  a  young 
man  guilty  of  one  of  the  most  cruel,  cold- 
blooded, and  atrocious  murders  on  record,  hav- 
ing killed  deliberately  the  girl  who  loved  and 
trusted  him  because  he  did  not  know  how  else  to 
get  rid  of  her,  wrote  letters  from  the  condemned 
cell  and  when  distant  from  the  electric  chair  only 
a  few  days  which,  in  moderate  language,  made 
our  blood  boil.  He  might  have  been  the  saint  of 
God ;  his  victim  and  her  family  and  friends  the 
impenitent  sinners  who  stood  in  need  of  forgive- 
ness. What  is  the  psychological  explanation  of 
these  constantly  recurring  phenomena?  The 
piety  begins  when  the  doom  is  certain.  Not  un- 
til the  last  appeal  has  been  dismissed  and  the 
[139] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

date  of  the  execution  is  fixed  beyond  recall  and 
the  last  hope  has  failed  do  the  penitence  and  the 
piety  reach  their  height.  Human  justice  has 
found  the  wrong-doer  in  this  world.  He  is  afraid 
that  divine  justice  will  find  him  in  the  next. 
Hitherto  he  has  bent  his  energies  upon  the  task 
of  securing  pardon  here.  No  faint  chance  of 
that  remains.  So  now  he  wants  to  find  pardon 
— that  is  to  say,  remission  of  penalty,  escape 
from  punishment — there.  He  is  faUing  away 
from  solid  things  into  the  unknown  and  the  in- 
finite. He  is  plunging  into  the  vast  and  terrible 
unknown.  The  prospect  is  hideous,  unbearable. 
He  knows  now  what  earthly  law  and  the  admin- 
istration of  law  can  do.  O  God,  he  wonders 
what  heavenly  law  and  its  administration  can  do  ! 
Horrors  seize  him  ;  the  human  judge  has  refused 
to  pardon ;  he  wants  the  celestial  Judge  to  let  him 
off! 

Forgiveness  of  sin  is  one  thing.  Remission  of 
penalty  is  another.  The  Scriptures  say  much 
about  forgiveness  of  sin  and  little  about  escape 
from  penalty.  The  Scriptures  offer  us  on  almost 
every  page  forgiveness.  They  cannot  offer 
[140] 


Forgive    Us   Our  Debts 

escape  from  the  consequences  of  sin,  for  these 
are  part  of  the  universal  order  and  are  immutable 
as  the  laws  of  gravitation.  God  Himself  cannot 
take  the  penalty  out  of  a  life  and  leave  the  sin  in 
it.  And  though  the  sin  be  forgiven,  God's  way 
of  mitigating  the  penalty — shall  we  not  say, 
His  only  way?  at  least  the  only  way  He  has 
chosen  to  leave  open  to  Himself  in  view  of  the 
course  and  constitution  of  the  universe  as  He  has 
shaped  and  ordered  it — is  to  bring  into  the  soul 
new  forces,  setting  up  new  processes,  entailing 
new  and  nobler  consequences,  working  against 
the  existing  results  of  accomplished  sin,  and 
placing  over  against  them  consequences,  as 
natural  and  inevitable,  of  a  regenerated  will  and  a 
consecrated  life.  Forgiveness  is  not  some  single 
act  of  magical  surgery  which  cuts  out  of  the 
body  the  punishment  which  wrong-doing  has 
brought  into  it  as  a  disease,  leaving  the  body  no 
worse  for  the  disease  which  had  ravaged  it. 
Forgiveness  is  as  the  sum  total  of  the  combined 
action  of  good  food,  pure  air,  abundant  rest, 
beneficent  drugs,  and  the  recuperative  forces  of 
nature,  building  up  again  the  system  weakened 
[141] 


The  Lord^s  Prayer 

by  disease.  Sin  is  a  destructive  force ;  punishment 
is  the  destruction  it  effects.  Forgiveness  is  a  con- 
structive force,  and  its  consequences,  as  logical 
and  natural,  have  to  make  their  way  against  the 
wasting  and  disintegrating  power  of  sin. 

We  ought  to  try  to  understand  the  nature  of 
this  wonderful  thing  we  call  forgiveness.  There 
is  a  new  spirit  within  us  producing  new  and 
potent  results.  Can  we  define  it  or  describe  its 
operations  ? 

It  is  sunshine  in  our  souls  instead  of  cloud  and 
gloom.  The  difference  in  our  feehngs  is  that 
which  a  person  sensitive  to  atmospheric  condi- 
tions experiences  according  as  the  day  is  over- 
cast, heavy,  depressing — or  bright,  inspiring,  ex- 
hilarating, a  day  when  it  is  a  pure  joy  to  be 
alive.  Only,  as  the  things  of  human  life  and 
destiny,  of  the  soul's  eternal  relation  to  God,  are 
infinitely  more  than  a  day  of  fog  or  an  hour  of 
good  weather,  so  the  sunshine  in  our  soul  tran- 
scends the  brightness  of  a  summer  morning.  It 
is  reconciliation  instead  of  antagonism,  reconcilia- 
tion with  God  and  with  the  order  of  His  world, 
and  a  feeling  that  one  is  walking  again  in  His 
[142] 


Forgive    Us   Our  Debts 

favour  and  in  the  light  of  His  love.  It  is  peace 
amid  the  joy  of  conflict,  and  the  man  or  woman 
is  to  be  pitied  who  does  not  know  what  that 
peace  is.  There  is  evil  in  the  world  and  in  our- 
selves :  there  is  good  in  the  world  and  in  our- 
selves. The  good  must  do  battle  with  the  evil. 
When  we  are  engaged  in  that  battle,  fighting  for 
the  good  in  the  world  and  in  ourselves  against 
the  evil  in  the  world  and  in  ourselves,  we  are  in 
harmony  with  ourselves  as  God  made  us  and  with 
His  everlasting  purposes.  And  so,  however 
fierce  the  conflict,  we  are  at  peace  in  the  midst 
of  it.  Before,  we  lived  in  slavish  acquiescence  in 
our  bondage  to  evil  desire  and  evil  habit :  now 
we  are  urged  by  impulses  of  liberty.  Before,  we 
walked  in  sullen  despair  or  cynical  levity.  We 
accepted  ourselves,  and  we  knew  in  our  own 
hearts  when  we  looked  for  the  knowledge  that 
our  years  were  marked  by  deepening  degeneracy. 
Now  we  resolve,  look  up,  aspire,  greatly  dare  and 
bravely  hope.  This  is  the  change  which  forgive- 
ness has  worked  in  our  souls. 

Punishment  of  past  sins  there  may  be.     If  we 
have  gambled  away  a  fortune  or  spent  our  sub- 
[143] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

stance  in  riotous  living,  why,  the  money  is  gone, 
and  all  the  repentance  in  the  world  will  not  in- 
duce the  harpies  who  have  made  their  profit  out 
of  our  vices  to  give  it  back  to  us.  If  we  have 
spent  the  formative  years  of  our  young  life  from 
fifteen  to  twenty-five  in  idleness  and  folly,  so 
that  we  are  ignorant  and  incompetent  when  we 
come  into  the  world's  work,  penitence  will  not 
perform  for  us  an  Arabian-Nights-Dream  kind  of 
miracle  and  make  us  the  equal  of  our  contempo- 
raries who  have  spurned  delights  and  lived  la- 
borious days.  If  we  have  given  ourselves  over 
to  false  speaking,  punishment  comes  in  the  brand 
of  a  liar  and  a  reputation  which  brings  us  the 
strong  man's  contempt.  And  if  we  have  done  a 
criminal  act  and  come  within  the  grip  of  the  law, 
penitence  will  not  open  for  us  the  prison  door. 
But — and  this  is  the  essential  thing — penitence 
which  is  sincere  and  which  brings  us  forgiveness, 
as  we  have  carefully  defined  it,  a  new  spirit  in  us 
working  wondrous  changes,  will  now  set  up  new 
movements  within  us.  By  our  industry,  appHca- 
tion,  diligence,  we  may  earn  money  to  replace 
that  which  we  spent  in  vice  and  foolishness.  By 
[144] 


Forgive   Us  Our  Debts 

our  devotion  to  our  profession  or  business  we 
may  begin  to  make  up  for  the  time  that  we  lost. 
By  our  rectitude,  honour,  and  manifest  love  of 
truth  we  may  recover  the  reputation  which  was 
smirched  and  the  esteem  of  people  whose  esteem 
is  worth  having.  And  though  the  prison  gates 
have  closed  upon  us  and  all  our  lives  the  record 
stands,  we  may  yet  take  our  place  amongst  the 
men  and  women  who  have  fallen  but  risen  again. 
The  consequence  of  the  sin,  it  is  clear,  is  not 
abolished  by  forgiveness.  It  cannot  be  abol- 
ished. It  has  become  a  part  of  the  moral  order 
of  the  world.  Some  part  of  the  consequence 
may  be  offset  by  the  new  life  which  forgiveness 
inspires.  The  act  cannot  be  undone  nor  the 
world  go  on  as  though  it  had  never  been  done. 
Forgiveness  is  not  remission  of  penalty.  In  us 
is  a  new,  rich,  joyous,  believing,  hopeful  spirit — 
and  this  is  the  gift  which  forgiveness  brings. 

And  now,  though  it  may  seem  that  we  have 
travelled  a  long  way  round  to  reach  the  point, 
we  see  the  absolute  propriety  and  justice  of  this 
prayer  :  Forgive  us  as  we  have  forgiven.  We 
cannot  be  forgiven  on  any  other  terms.  Shall 
[145] 


The  Lord^s    Prayer 

we  again  go  over  the  phrases  in  which  we  tried 
to  describe  the  state  of  soul  which  forgiveness 
creates?  It  would  be  wearying  work.  Sun- 
shine, peace,  harmony,  aspiration,  hope,  joy, 
tenderness,  love — but  these  represent  the  heart 
which  forgives  equally  with  that  which  receives 
forgiveness  !  Describe  the  spirit  which  cannot 
because  it  will  not  forgive:  black  resentment, 
fierce  antagonism,  jarring  and  jangUng  dishar- 
mony, turbulence,  violence  of  thought,  a  soul 
perpetually  centring  round  itself.  This  is  the 
heart  which  God  cannot  forgive,  not  because  of 
any  indisposition  on  His  part,  but  because  the 
heart  cannot  receive  forgiveness.  We  pray  to 
be  forgiven  as  we  have  already  forgiven,  not  be- 
cause our  forgiving  spirit  entitles  us  to  the  for- 
giveness of  God  or  wins  Him  to  a  grace  like  our 
own,  but  because  now  we  have  come  into  a  con- 
dition of  heart  in  which  forgiveness  can  effect  an 
entrance  and  have  its  perfect  work. 

We  can  go  back  to  the  objection  to  which  we 

gave  full  force  at  the  beginning  of  this  study  and 

to  the  questions  we  put.     Must  God  wait  to  be 

good    until  we  are  good?    Is  our  grace  the 

[146] 


Forgive   Us  Our  Debts 

measure  of  His  own  ?  No  ;  but  until  we  have 
the  spirit  which  forgives  we  have  not  the  spirit 
which  can  be  forgiven.  If  it  were  possible  for  us 
to  receive  love  from  God  and  give  out  hate  to 
men ;  if  we  could  be  joyous  towards  Him  and 
sullen  to  our  neighbours ;  if  we  could  accept 
from  Him  sunshine,  tenderness,  and  love  while 
we  continued  to  walk  in  arrogance,  hostility,  and 
deep  disdain  of  our  fellow  men,  it  would  be  be- 
cause we  lived  in  a  world  whose  order  was  im- 
moral and  corrupting.  Nothing  of  the  kind  is 
possible.  We  are  only  darkening  counsel  by 
words  without  knowledge,  confusing  ourselves 
by  means  of  repeated  contradiction  in  terms. 
The  only  spirit  which  can  be  forgiven  is  the 
spirit  which  forgives.  And  so  we  pray,  as  Jesus 
taught  us  :  Our  Father  ;  forgive  us  our  debts  as 
we  have  forgiven  our  debtors. 

Did  you  ever  try  to  forgive  when  it  was  very 
difficult  for  you  to  do  it  ?  Nay,  a  more  direct 
and  personal  question  :  does  it  happen  that  you 
cherish  in  your  heart  at  this  moment  resentment 
against  some  person  once  dear  to  you  because  of 
a  real  or  fancied  insult  or  injury?  Have  you 
[147] 


The  Lord''s  Prayer 

brought  your  gift  to  the  altar  and  do  you  now 
remember  that  you  have  something  of  hostility 
in  your  soul  against  your  brother  ?  Then  I  pray 
you  :  leave  there  thy  gift  before  the  altar  and  go 
thy  way.  Forgive  the  one  who  has  done  you 
wrong,  and  then  come  and  offer  your  gift  and 
pray  your  prayer :  Forgive  us  our  shortcomings^ 
as  we  also  have  forgiven  those  who  have  failed  in 
their  duty  towards  us. 

And  have  you  realized  that  all  who  name  the 
name  of  Christ  are  called  to  stand  before  the 
world  in  Christ's  place  and  forgive  the  sins  of  the 
world  ?  An  English  man  of  business,  whose  af- 
fairs called  him  often  to  Spain  where  he  mingled 
freely  with  the  country  people,  said  that  he  had 
done  effective  missionary  service  often,  after  a  few 
minutes'  conversation  upon  indifferent  themes,  by 
bidding  the  peasant  with  whom  he  talked,  "  Re- 
member, no  man  can  forgive  you  your  sins. 
That  is  all.  But  think  about  it :  No  man  can 
forgive  you  your  sins."  As  a  polemic  against 
Romanism  and  the  alleged  powers  of  the 
sacerdotal  order  the  remark  may  pass.  And  in 
the  deepest  sense  it  is  true :  only  God  can  for- 
[148] 


Forgive   Us   Our  Debts 

give  us  our  sins.  But  the  priest  has  still  a  func- 
tion in  the  Christian  Church.  We  must  not 
deny  true  priesthood  because  of  the  sins  of  a 
false  one.  Christianity  abolishes  priestcraft,  but 
it  does  it  by  universalizing  priesthood.  We  are 
called  to  be  priests,  all  of  us,  men  and  women 
who  have  been  born  of  the  spirit  that  cometh 
from  above.  We  are  a  kingdom  of  priests  unto 
our  Father,  God.  And  we  have  to  mediate 
God's  forgiveness  to  God's  world.  We  must  do 
more  than  preach  forgiveness,  declare  that  God's 
forgiveness  can  be  had  on  terms.  We  must  be- 
come the  agents  of  that  forgiveness.  In  God's 
name  and  in  His  power  and  on  behalf  of  Christ, 
we  must  forgive  the  sins  of  men. 

How?  This  exposition  has  failed  utterly  if 
you  need  to  ask.  Here  is  a  man  who  has  sinned. 
He  has  been  guilty  of  repeated  wrong-doing. 
He  is  down  and  he  knows  it.  He  has  not 
strength  to  rise  and  does  not  care  whether  he 
rises  or  not.  Now,  show  your  contempt  for  this 
man.  Tell  him  that  he  is  down  and  that  he 
deserves  to  be.  He  has  brought  it  upon  himself 
and  he  need  not  have  expected  anything  differ- 
[149] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

ent.  When  he  asks  for  another  chance,  tell  him 
he  has  had  too  many  chances  as  it  is :  "I 
trusted  you  before,  and  how  have  you  repaid  my 
confidence  ?  There  you  are.  There  you  deserve 
to  be.  And  there  you  may  stay."  You  have 
fastened  that  man  up  in  his  sin.  You  have 
fastened  his  sin  up  in  him.  You  have  quenched 
the  last  faint  gleam  of  hope.  You  have  con- 
firmed him  in  his  recklessness.  You  have  per- 
suaded him — if  there  was  any  lingering  manhood 
in  him  that  needed  persuasion — that  struggle  was 
hopeless.  You  have  driven  him  to  despair.  But 
treat  him  differently :  "  You  have  done  wrong 
and  you  are  paying  the  penalty.  But  I  am  sorry 
for  you  and  should  hke  to  see  you  doing  some- 
thing worthy  of  yourself.  You  are  too  good  a 
man  for  this.  You  are  worth  too  much  to  your- 
self and  to  the  world  and  in  the  sight  of  God. 
There  is  strength  in  your  man's  heart  for  another 
struggle,  and  if  you  make  one  fight  more,  the 
last  and  the  best,  you  shall  be  victor  yet.  I  be- 
lieve in  you,  and  good  men  and  women  will  be- 
lieve in  you,  and  God  and  His  Christ  believe  in 
you  " — and  you  have  put  new  heart  and  soul  into 
[150] 


Forgive   Us   Our  Debts 

him,  vigour,  hope,  resolve.     By  the  grace  of  God 
you  have  made  a  man  of  him. 

Broaden  your  view.  We  are  to  become  the 
active  agents  of  God's  forgiveness  in  society. 
Abhorrence  of  sin  there  must  be.  We  who  have 
seen  in  Jesus  Christ  the  ideal  of  humanity  and 
have  learned  from  Him  its  worth,  must  continue 
to  hate  sin  which  debauches  and  degrades  and 
corrupts  the  souls  He  died  to  save.  We  must 
manifest  our  horror  and  our  detestation  of  lives 
given  up  to  dishonesty,  impurity,  vice,  and  crime. 
But  we  who  have  learned  the  meaning  of  the 
Cross  of  Christ  must  show  that  for  the  individual 
whose  sin  we  loathe  there  is  in  our  hearts  a  di- 
vine compassion.  Through  intensest  condemna- 
tion of  sin  must  shine  supernal  pity  for  the  sin- 
ner. Ever  we  must  cherish  and  ever  manifest 
the  beUef  that  the  sinning  one,  so  fallen,  so  lost, 
is  capable  of  rising  to  the  life  God  meant  him 
to  live.  Play  the  Pharisee,  if  you  will ;  broaden 
your  phylacteries  ;  and  for  a  pretense  make  long 
prayers  ;  let  every  action  breathe  disdain  of  men 
and  women  who  wander  from  the  light ;  lift  your 
hands  and  cry  :  "  Back,  back,  I  am  holier  than 
[151] 


T^he  Lord^s  Prayer 

thou  ! " — and  you  plunge  such  people  deeper 
into  evil.  You  inflame  in  their  souls  a  hatred 
of  good.  But  let  them  feel  the  nobility  of  char- 
acter and  consecration.  Let  them  hear  the 
music  and  the  songs  of  happy  goodness.  Let 
them  see  the  beauty  of  holiness.  And  through 
all  let  them  know  that  you  expect  such  things  as 
these  from  them.  Make  them  believe  that  they 
have  it  in  them  to  attain  ;  that  God  hopes  noth- 
ing less  from  them  ;  that  you  and  all  good  men 
and  women  everywhere  and  all  the  powers  that 
soon  or  late  win  for  man  some  sacred  goal  wait 
to  befriend  and  succour  them  ;  that  God  Himself 
is  reaching  out  a  hand  to  draw  them  from  the 
horrible  pit  and  the  miry  clay  and  is  ready  to 
put  a  new  song  in  their  mouth — and  on  behalf 
of  Christ  and  in  His  name  you  have  forgiven  the 
sins  of  men.  Then  you  shall  pray  with  a  deeper 
meaning  than  ever  in  your  life  before  :  Forgive 
us  our  sins  as  we  have  forgiven.  May  that 
prayer  never  cease  upon  this  earth  till  sin  shall 
cease  !    May  that  prayer  avail  for  all  mankind ! 


[152] 


VII 


Bring    Us  Not   Into   Temptation^ 
But  Deliver  Us  From  the  Evil 


God  has  cast  us  into  this  life,  as  it  were  into  an  alembic, 
where,  after  a  previous  existence  which  we  have  forgotten,  we 
are  condemned  to  be  remade,  renewed,  purified,  by  sufifering, 
by  strife,  by  passion,  by  doubt,  disease  and  death.  All  these 
evils  we  endure  for  our  good,  for  our  purification,  and,  so  to 
speak,  to  make  us  perfect.  From  age  to  age,  from  race  to  race, 
we  accomplish  a  tardy  progress,  tardy  but  certain  :  an  advance 
of  which,  in  spite  of  all  the  sceptics  say,  the  proofs  are  manifest. 
If  all  the  imperfections  of  our  being  and  all  the  woes  of  our  es- 
tate, drive  at  discouraging  and  terrifying  us,  on  the  other  hand 
all  our  more  noble  faculties,  which  have  been  bestowed  upon 
us  that  we  may  know  God  and  seek  after  perfection,  do  make 
for  our  salvation  and  deliver  us  from  doubt,  from  fear,  and  even 
from  Death. — George  Sand. 


VII 

BRING  US  NOT  INTO  TEMPTATION,  BUT 
DELIVER  US  FROM  THE  EVIL 

THE  Revised  Version  has  made  an  im- 
portant change  in  the  second  clause  of 
this  petition.  **  Lead  us  not  into  temp- 
tation, but  deliver  us  from  evil  "  is  the  familiar 
form  of  the  prayer.  "  Deliver  us  from  the  evil 
one "  is  the  reading  of  the  Revised  Version. 
The  suggestion  is  not  a  happy  one.  The  old 
reading  was  better.  The  petition  as  we  have  al- 
ways read  it  is  sufficiently  loaded  with  intellectual 
and  moral  difficulties.  The  new  reading  would 
introduce  an  added  element  of  unreality.  The 
modern  man  or  woman  is  by  no  means  con- 
vinced of  the  existence  of  a  malign,  seducing, 
ubiquitous  personage  here  described  as  "  the  evil 
one."  The  devout  soul  does  not  wish  to  be  led 
away  from  genuine  prayer  by  an  irrelevant  dis- 
cussion of  "  the  personality  of  the  devil."  Such 
considerations  would  ruin  the  prayer  as  a  vehicle 
for  the  utterance  of  deep  spiritual  need.  Few  of 
[155] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

us  to-day,  if  this  form  were  insisted  upon,  would 
offer  the  prayer  with  realizing  earnestness.  We 
might  as  a  prescribed  duty  repeat  a  formula. 
The  prayer  would  seldom  rise  spontaneously  to 
our  lips. 

We  are  under  no  obligation  to  follow  the  Re- 
visers in  this  particular.  It  is  admitted  that  the 
definite  article  is  in  the  original  and  that  the 
words  must  mean  "  the  evil."  But  it  is  also  ad- 
mitted that  the  words  may  be  either  masculine  or 
neuter.  Writing  in  Greek,  whether  one  wished 
to  say  "  Deliver  us  from  the  evil  "  or  "  Deliver 
us  from  the  evil  person "  (of  the  masculine 
gender)  he  would  use  the  same  form  of  words. 
What  is  meant,  therefore,  is  not  a  question  of 
grammar  but  of  interpretation.  It  is  perfectly 
true  that  the  oriental  method  of  expression  al- 
ways tended  towards  personification,  so  that  there 
is  a  strong  presumption  in  favour  of  the  new 
reading.  But  we  are  not  orientals.  We  do  not 
find  it  helpful  to  think  of  evil  in  this  embodied, 
personal  way.  It  is  as  natural  for  us  to  think  of 
evil  in  the  abstract  as  for  the  oriental  to  think  of 
it  in  the  concrete.  And  as  the  form  of  words 
[156] 


Bring  Us  Not  Into  Temptation 


leaves  the  choice  open  to  us  we  shall  do  well  to 
dismiss  from  our  minds  the  idea  of  personifica- 
tion as  we  try  to  understand  this  prayer.  But 
the  word  "  the  "  should  be  retained— Z?^//V'fr  us 
from  the  evil.  For  it  may  be  that  the  entire 
significance  and  value  of  the  prayer,  Bring  us 
not  into  temptation,  will  turn  upon  our  under- 
standing of  "  the  evil  "  from  which  we  pray  to  be 
delivered. 

The  "  intellectual  and  moral  difficulties  "  with 
which  the  prayer  is  charged  arise  out  of  the  felt 
impropriety  of  conceiving  that  God  could  under 
any  circumstances  lead  His  people  into  tempta- 
tion. Why  should  we  pray  Bring  tis  not  ijito 
temptation  since  we  cannot  without  doing 
violence  to  all  that  we  believe  and  feel  about 
God  imagine  that  He  is  likely  to  lead  us  into  it  ? 
The  words  bring  before  us  the  picture  of  a  cruel 
or  cunning  spirit  seeking  to  inveigle  poor  souls 
into  wrong.  The  Mephistopheles  of  the  Faust 
legend  may  entrap  souls  in  this  way.  The 
demon  of  the  Hartz  mountains,  appearing  in  the 
folk-lore  of  many  centuries,  may  lay  plots  for  in- 
dividual souls,  induce  them  to  sign  a  contract  in 
[157] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 


their  own  blood,  and  rejoice  in  the  consusftimation 
of  their  ruin.  But  what  has  all  this  to  do  with 
the  God  whom  Jesus  has  taught  us  to  call 
"  Father  "  ?  In  the  Book  of  Samuel  it  is  stated 
that  the  "  anger  of  the  Lord  was  kindled  against 
Israel,  and  He  moved  David  against  them  say- 
ing, *  Go,  number  Israel  and  Judah.'  "  This  the 
historian  treats  as  a  gross  offense,  and  so,  in  a 
later  age,  the  compiler  of  the  Book  of  Chronicles, 
refusing  to  admit  that  the  hand  of  God  wa«  in  the 
evil  suggestion,  declares  that  it  was  Sataii  who 
moved  David  to  this  act.  It  is  not  for  us  to  fall 
below  the  spirituality  of  the  writers  who  have 
given  us  the  Books  of  Chronicles.  We  must  not 
revert  to  the  idea  of  a  God  who  seduces  the  souls 
of  His  people  into  sin  or  even  plans  to  surround 
them  with  such  evil  influences  that  we  need  to 
pray  to  Him,  Bring  us  not  into  temptation.  It 
would  almost  seem  as  though  the  author  of  the 
Epistle  of  James  had  this  difficulty  of  our  prayef 
and  the  interpretation  of  the  prayer  in  mind 
when  he  wrote  the  strong  words  about  "  tempta- 
tion "  with  which  his  letter  opens.  Count  it  all 
Joy,  my  brethren,  says  James,  when  ye  fall 
[158] 


Bring  Us  Not  Into  Temptation 


into  manifold  temptations.  Blessed  is  the 
man,  he  says,  who  endureth  temptation.  And 
then — as  though  this  clause  in  the  Lord's 
Prayer  came  to  check  his  rejoicing  and  his  sense 
of  the  benediction  involved  in  the  endurance  of 
temptation — he  hastens  to  add,  Let  no  man  say 
when  he  is  tempted,  I  am  tempted  of  God,  for 
God,  Himself  untempted,  tempteth  no  tnan. 
These  sayings  of  James  may  seem  to  be  them- 
selves obscure.  Undoubtedly  we  need  to  have 
it  explained  why  we  should  count  it  joy  to  fall 
into  temptation  yet  revolt  from  the  conception 
that  God  has  planned  the  joy  for  us.  Yet  if  his 
vigorous  statement  is  to  stand  unchallenged, 
God  tempteth  no  man,  why  should  we  school 
ourselves  to  pray  to  God,  Bri?ig  us  not  into  temp- 
tation ?  Why  beseech  Him  not  to  do  that  which 
James  says  He  never  does  and  never  can  do  ? 

Our  way  of  using  the  word  "  tempt "  is  in 
large  measure  responsible  for  the  difficulty.  The 
word  does  not  primarily  mean  "  to  seduce,  to  en- 
tice, to  solicit,  to  allure  into  sin."  This  meaning 
is  now  stereotyped  in  the  word  "  temptation," 
but  the  earlier  meaning  was  "  to  try,"  "  to  make 
[159] 


The  Liord^s  Prayer 

test  of,"  and  it  lives  on  in  our  word  "  attempt " 
and  in  •'  tentative  "  which  is  really  "  temptative," 
or  if  you  like  "  attemptative,"  a  step  taken  in 
making  the  attempt  or  trial.  In  the  Old  Testa- 
ment and  the  New  Testament  alike  the  words 
which  are  translated  "  tempt "  and  "  temptation  " 
are  frequently  used  to  express  the  fact  of  trial,  of 
testing,  not  by  any  means  in  a  bad  sense.  The  first 
instance  of  its  use  is  in  an  early  chapter  of  Genesis 
where  God  is  said  to  "  tempt "  Abraham  in  the 
matter  of  the  offering  of  his  son  Isaac  as  a  sacri- 
fice, the  meaning  there  being  that  God  planned 
to  "  test  "  Abraham  and  put  his  faith  to  the  proof. 
In  the  Twenty-sixth  Psalm  occurs  the  prayer 
"  Examine  me,  O  Lord,  and  prove  me,"  and  the 
word  for  "  prove "  is  that  which  is  elsewhere 
translated  "  tempt."  In  the  New  Testament  the 
words  here  translated  "  tempt "  and  "  tempta- 
tion" are  used  about  sixty  times.  Frequently 
they  point  to  evil  trial,  but  not  invariably  so. 
They  retain  their  meaning  of  "  trial,"  "  testing," 
without  necessarily  an  evil  significance,  "  Jesus 
therefore  lifting  up  His  eyes,  and  seeing  that  a 
great  multitude  cometh  unto  Him,  saith  unto 
[i6o] 


Bring  Us  Not  Into  Temptation 

Philip, '  Whence  are  we  to  buy  bread  that  these 
may  eat  ? '  And  this  He  said  to  prove  Phihp,  for 
He  Himself  knew  what  He  would  do  ; "  to  prove 
Philip,  test  him,  see  what  he  would  answer  and 
what  was  in  his  mind — but  the  word  is  our  word 
"  tempt."  "  And  when  they — Paul  and  Silas — 
were  come  over  against  Mysia,  they  assayed  to 
go  into  Bithynia  " — assayed,  attempted  to  go  into 
Bithynia — and  it  is  the  same  word  "  tempt." 
And  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  referring  to  the 
trial  of  Abraham's  faith,  uses  the  same  word, 
which  in  our  New  Testament  is  translated 
"  tried  " — "  By  faith,  Abraham  being  tried,  offered 
up  Isaac."  And  with  these  illustrations  in  view 
the  meaning  of  the  petition  in  the  Lord's  Prayer 
becomes  plain :  "  Bring  us  not  into  circumstances 
of  great  moral  trial ;  make  not  too  large  a  demand 
upon  our  faith,  courage,  and  resolution ;  bring  us 
not  into  the  fiery  testing  which  may  prove  too 
severe  for  our  yielding  hearts ;  our  Father,  bring  us 
not  into  conditions  which  shall  too  sorely  try  us, 
for  we  know  ourselves  and  our  weakness,  and  we 
may  fail ! " 

This  explanation  of  the  meaning  of  the  word 
[i6i] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

removes  from  the  petition  the  element  of  irrever- 
ence. There  can  be  no  impropriety  in  thinking 
that  God  leads  us  into  a  position  in  which  faith, 
hope,  and  love  may  all  be  put  to  the  test.  But 
the  question  remains,  and  with  full  force.  Ought 
we  to  pray  to  be  kept  from  such  circumstances 
and  conditions  ?  Ought  we  to  want  to  avoid  the 
great  occasion  which  may  greatly  try  us  ? 
Ought  we  not,  as  James  desired  us,  to  rejoice 
when  we  are  called  upon  to  pass  through  such 
experiences,  and  for  the  reason  he  gives,  that 
such  occasions  of  trial  breed  in  us  a  heroic  stead- 
fastness ?  Ought  we  to  pray  for  escape  from 
such  grounding  in  noble  character  ? 

We  are  in  the  habit  of  assuming  that  escape 
from  crowded,  stifling  streets  and  towering  build- 
ings shutting  out  God's  sun  and  airs  to  the  sea- 
shore and  the  mountain  slopes  is  escape  from  a 
life  charged  with  contagion  and  an  omnipresent 
menace  to  health  into  comparative  security.  In 
the  main,  doubtless,  we  are  right.  Yet  it  must 
have  occurred  to  most  of  you  and  more  than 
once  that  whereas  you  expect  to  come  back  from 
a  holiday  refreshed,  braced  up,  and  in  condition 
[162] 


Bring  Us  Not  Into  Temptation 


to  resist  disease,  you  fall  a  prey  too  quickly  to 
one  or  other  of  the  minor  physical  ailments 
which  distress  us.  We  say  that  the  good  effect 
of  the  country  holiday  has  soon  worn  off.  We 
ought  to  have  been  able  to  withstand  the"  cold" 
or  the  epidemic  "  grippe  "  or  what  not  after  such 
a  period  of  recuperation.  And  it  has  been  sug- 
gested with  some  show  of  reason  that  the  im- 
munity from  contagion  which  we  enjoyed  dur- 
ing our  stay  in  the  high  altitudes  or  by  the  sea 
has  really  left  us  less  capable  of  resisting  the  in- 
fection of  a  germ-laden  air  when  we  return. 
While  we  were  living  in  it  we,  in  a  way,  grew  ac- 
customed to  it ;  our  system  braced  itself  to  with- 
stand its  attacks.  But  after  living  for  some  time 
in  the  purer  atmosphere,  then,  when  we  come 
back  to  the  polluted  air  of  the  great  cities,  we 
feel  the  change  keenly  and  are  ready  to  succumb. 
The  author  of  "  The  Soul  of  London  !'  quotes  a 
keen-eyed  modern  physician  as  declaring,  "  Why, 
I  would  rather  attend  fifty  London  street-rats 
with  half  a  lung  apiece  than  one  great  hulking 
farm  bailiff.  These  are  the  fellows,  after  all,  the 
London  scaramouches,  for  getting  over  an  ill- 
[163] 


The  Lord's    Prayer 

ness."  "  Don't  you  see,  my  dear  sir,"  he  goes 
on,  "  your  problem  is  to  breed  disease-resisting 
men  ?  Purify  the  cities  if  you  can.  Get  rid  of 
smoke  and  foul  air,  if  you  can.  But  breed  a  race 
fitted  to  inhabit  them  in  any  case." 

May  there  not  be  something  like  this  in  the 
moral  life  ?  Is  escape  from  every  occasion  and 
circumstance  of  tr^ial,  immunity  from  the  testing 
and  siftmg  of  a  many-coloured,  active  Hfe  crowded 
with  responsibihties,  good  for  us  all  and  good  for 
us  always  ?  One  of  the  really  great  seers  of  our 
time  and  country,  a  man  whose  clear  sight  into 
the  heart  of  things  is  God's  good  gift  to  this  gen- 
eration, has  embodied  this  view  in  an  amazingly 
farcical  story  of  a  town  supposed  to  be  incor- 
ruptible because  untested  and  untried.  Through 
the  screams  of  laughter  which  wake  the  very 
echoes  of  the  surrounding  country,  the  voice  of 
the  moralist  makes  itself  heard.  And  when  at 
last  with  shame  and  in  public  humihation  the 
town  emerges  from  the  trial  in  which  it  has  so 
utterly  failed,  it  is  allowed  by  act  of  legislature, 
upon  prayer  and  petition,  to  change  its  name  and 
leave  one  word  out  of  the  motto  that  for  many 
[164] 


Bring  Us  Not  Into  Temptation 

years  had  graced  the  town's  official  seal,  which 
for  the  future  reads — "  Lead  us  into  temptation ! " 
Has  the  insight  of  a  great  teacher  for  once  be- 
trayed him  ?  Then  did  John  Milton  err  as  griev- 
ously? "His  soul  was  Hke  a  star  and  dwelt 
apart ;  "  did  it  dwell  in  such  aloofness  from  man's 
common  lot  that  he  mistook  the  conditions  un- 
der which  alone  the  heroic  life  may  be  well 
lived  ?  In  the  noblest  of  Enghsh  prose  Milton 
roundly  asserts  : 

"  I  cannot  praise  a  fugitive  and  cloistered 
virtue,  unexercised  and  unbreathed,  that  never 
sallies  out  and  sees  her  adversary,  but  slinks  out 
of  the  race  where  that  immortal  garland  is  to  be 
run  for  not  without  dust  and  heat.  .  .  .  Were 
I  the  chooser,  a  dram  of  well-doing  should  be 
preferred  before  many  times  as  much  the  forcible 
hindrance  of  evil-doing.  For  God  sure  esteems 
the  growth  and  completing  of  one  virtuous  per- 
son more  than  the  restraint  of  ten  vicious." 

Surely  there  is  wisdom  in  this  teaching ;  and 
our  hearts  leap  up  to  answer  the  more  ringing 
cry  of  James,  "  Count  it  all  joy,  my  beloved 
brethren,  when  ye  fall  into  these  manifold  occa- 


The  Lord^s  Prayer 

sions  of  the  testing  and  trial  and  training  of  your 
sturdy  character ! " 

From  this  point  of  view  it  would  seem  that  we 
are  contemplating  an  utterly  impossible  prayer. 
Without  delaying  one  minute  to  consider  the 
more  obvious  and  vulgar  situations  of  trial  in 
which  the  best  men  and  women  may  sometimes 
find  themselves,  without  discussing  the  vicissi- 
tudes of  Hfe  which  bring  us  into  conditions  where 
the  concrete  and  gross  sins  of  hfe  may  wait  for 
those  who  fail  in  the  testing  of  their  strength,  we 
see  that  life  is  full,  literally  full,  of  scenes  and 
times  of  trial.  And  what  is  more,  the  fuller  and 
richer  our  life  becomes,  the  more  numerous,  com- 
plicated, and  exacting  will  such  occasions  be. 
Towards  this  full  rich  life  the  activities  of  every 
one  of  us  are  tending.  Towards  this  full  rich 
life  tend  all  the  movements  of  our  time.  What 
has  happened  in  the  physical  universe  has  its 
spiritual  significance.  The  world  is  shrinking 
under  our  enterprise.  We  shake  hands  across 
the  Atlantic.  We  have  a  nodding  acquaintance 
with  all  the  ends  of  the  earth.  The  world  is  our 
parish.  We  think  in  continents.  We  take  up 
[i66] 


Bring  Us  Not  Into  Temptation 


the  isles  as  a  very  little  thing.  And  the  millions 
of  miles  of  cable,  telegraph,  and  telephone  wires 
are  the  nerves  of  our  world.  The  most  sheltered 
and  the  most  insignificant  of  human  beings 
throughout  the  whole  sphere  of  civiUzation  upon 
this  planet  is  affected ;  while  the  lives  of  men 
and  women  like  yourselves  are  transformed  from 
centre  to  circumference  by  the  swiftly-rushing 
century.  Responsibility,  influence,  power — these 
are  yours  ;  responsibility,  influence,  power  which 
Roman  emperors  never  knew  ! 

These  things,  too,  you  desire  ;  and  we  should 
be  speaking  falsely  in  our  prayers  and  to  our  own 
souls  if  we  denied  it.  You  think  and  plan  and 
toil  and  fight  for  wealth,  yet  not  for  the  satisfac- 
tion of  writing  down  a  numeral  with  a  line  of 
cyphers  after  it,  and  for  the  pleasure  of  saying, 
"  So  many  millions  are  mine."  The  money  is  to 
you  and  to  your  world  the  outward  symbol  of 
success,  consideration,  position,  influence,  direc- 
tion, command,  power,  vast  responsibility,  often 
a  crushing  burden,  yet  a  burden  you  would  not 
be  rid  of  if  you  could.  And  by  such  a  life  as 
this  you  are  daily  and  hourly  tried.  Not  only  is 
[167] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

financial,  intellectual,  nervous,  or  physical  failure 
a  possibility  of  such  a  Hfe;  moral  failure  stares 
you  in  the  face.  You  may  grow  selfish,  material, 
unsympathetic,  hard.  It  is  one  of  the  possibili- 
ties of  your  life  that  you  may  come  to  regard 
material  success  as  the  measure  of  manhood  and 
womanhood.  You  may  come  to  despise  those 
who  have  set  their  ambitions  on  the  finer  things 
of  the  spirit.  You  may  come  to  believe  that 
material  good  is  the  only  good ;  you  may  think 
too  much  of  wealth  and  all  that  wealth  can  do 
and  give ;  while  you  think  too  Httle,  oh,  sadly  too 
little,  of  unseen  but  eternal  reahties,  faith,  hope, 
love,  goodness,  Christ,  heaven,  immortality — the 
things  that  are  brighter  than  fame,  richer  than 
gold,  more  enduring  than  imperial  possessions, 
the  things  that  wealth  cannot  buy.  You  may 
grow  cruel  in  the  exercise  of  your  power,  care- 
less of  another's  rights,  reckless  of  his  wrongs  ; 
you  may  crush  through  all  opposition  and  fight 
your  way  onward  heedless  of  the  wreck  and  ruin 
that  you  cause.  You  know  and  I  know — you 
know  better  than  I  know  and  could  give  me 
twenty  illustrations  of  the  truth  of  this  for  one 
[i68] 


Bring  Us  Not  Into  Temptation 

which  I  could  give  you — that  such  developments 
— or  such  degeneration — do  as  a  matter  of  fact 
frequently  result  from  the  positions  of  "trial"  in 
which  such  a  life  as  yours  abounds. 

The  truth  is  that  as  you  think  about  this  you 
perceive  that  there  is  no  incident  of  our  daily  life 
which  does  not  constitute  an  occasion  of  trial. 
Life  could  not  be  lived  if  we  were  not  constantly 
doing  little  kindnesses  to  one  another.  One 
might  say  that  a  world  without  the  courtesies, 
amenities,  graces  of  our  days,  without  the  spirit 
of  kindness  and  without  the  fact  of  kindness, 
would  be  hell,  only  that  we  cannot  really  con- 
ceive of  such  a  hideous  world.  Yet  we  may  be 
tried,  tested,  and  some  of  us  may  fail  in  the  test- 
ing, by  a  favour  which  we  give  or  receive.  You 
may  grow  positively  insolent  in  your  fashion  of 
doing  somebody  a  good  turn.  One  has  known  a 
person  confer  a  kindness  in  such  a  way  that  but 
for  the  grace  of  God  the  recipient  of  it  would 
hate  the  giver  for  the  remainder  of  his  natural 
life.  Or  you  may  become  so  hard,  so  cold,  so 
mechanical  with  it  all,  and  apparently  so  grudg- 
ing, that  you  have  turned  a  virtue  into  some- 
[169] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

thing  undistinguishable  from  a  vice.  And  in  the 
same  way,  one  may  receive  a  favour  or  repeated 
favours  in  a  way  to  make  all  the  angels  weep. 
He  may  show  himself  grasping,  ungracious,  un- 
grateful ;  he  may  hate  himself  for  accepting  your 
kindness,  hate  the  world  which,  he  says,  has 
forced  him  into  a  position  in  which  he  needs 
your  kindness,  and  hate  you  because  you  are 
able  to  do  the  kindness.  Certainly  it  needs  grace 
on  both  sides.  Often  you  must  respect  a  man 
very  highly  and  love  him  very  much  before  you 
can  accept  a  kindness  from  him.  And  that  both 
of  you  shall  be  better  and  happier  for  it — well,  it 
needs  some  element  of  human  goodness  in  you 
both.  These,  it  may  be  repeated,  are  occasions 
of  trial  within  the  meaning  of  the  word — yet 
who  would  not  choose  annihilation  rather  than 
life  without  them  ? 

We  are  tried  by  the  love  of  our  dearest.  Love 
is  the  most  precious  thing  in  the  world.  Yet 
good  things  corrupted  show  themselves  more 
dangerous  than  things  intrinsically  evil.  It  is 
one  of  the  supreme  tragedies  of  our  life  that  love 
itself  may  be  perverted,  abused,  and  its  holy  in- 
[170] 


Bring  Us  Not  Into  Temptation 

fluences  corrupted.  Have  you  not  seen  for  your- 
self a  man  grow  year  by  year  a  worse  man  be- 
cause, as  it  seems,  some  good  woman  has  loved 
him  too  well  ?  It  may  be  a  wife ;  it  may  be  a 
mother ;  in  either  case  the  love  has  been  selfless, 
radiant,  and,  we  would  fain  hope,  deathless. 
When  we  try  to  think  in  terms  of  the  unthink- 
able and  unimaginable  glories  of  the  love  of  God, 
we  have  to  fall  back  upon  the  memories  and  sug- 
gestions of  such  human  love  as  this.  But  we 
have  seen  the  boy  grow  up  to  accept  these  as  his 
right,  to  become  an  ingrate,  a  churl,  a  brute  un- 
responsive to  the  mother-love.  We  have  seen 
the  man  accept  all,  give  nothing,  claim  every- 
thing, grow  selfish,  arrogant,  tyrannical,  an  in- 
sufferable offense  in  the  eyes  of  all  chivalrous 
manhood.  Yes,  and  women,  too !  There  are 
women  upon  whom  you  can  lavish  all  the  wealth  of 
human  love,  upon  whom  you  can  pour  out  the 
richest,  truest,  noblest  devotion  of  which  the 
strong  man's  heart  is  capable ;  women  for  whom 
a  man  may  toil  and  slave  and  for  whom  the 
whole  world's  protective  tenderness  would  not 
seem  to  the  husband's  or  the  lover's  eyes  too  great 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

a  gift,  who  grow  selfish,  self-contained  and  self- 
seeking,  cold,  disdainful,  insensate — not  sweeter 
and  purer  and  lovelier  for  such  a  divine  affection. 
These,  we  perceive  once  more,  are  occasions  of 
testing  and  of  trial.  Yet  who  would  not  spurn 
the  gift  of  life  itself  if  life  were  robbed  of  love  ? 

One  thing  then  has  grown  clear.  We  cannot 
pray  this  prayer  without  qualification,  without 
understanding,  using  the  words  in  their  plain 
grammatical  meaning,  accepting  them  literally 
and  the  implication  of  them.  The  petition  must 
needs  be  interpreted.  We  cannot  pray  to  be 
saved  from  the  occasions  which  may  try  and  test 
our  manhood  and  our  womanhood.  Responsi- 
bility, success,  and  positions  of  influence  test  us  : 
we  do  not  want  to  avoid  them.  Human  kindness 
given  or  received  tries  us :  we  will  not  pray  for 
less  of  it  but  for  more.  Love  is  the  supreme 
test :  we  will  not  pray  to  be  delivered  from  it.  O 
God,  give  us  more  love  and  better ;  teach  us  to 
love  ;  and  give  us  Thyself  to  love !  In  what  sense, 
then,  can  we  pray  this  prayer, "  Bring  us  not  into 
circumstances  that  try  and  test  us  "  ? 

It  is  the  cry  of  conscious  weakness.  *'  The 
Lord's  Prayer,"  says  a  Scotch  divine,  •'  is  not 
merely  for  heroes,  but  for  the  timid,  the  inex- 


Bring  Us  Not  Into  Temptation 

perienced.  The  Teacher  is  considerate  and  al- 
lows time  for  reaching  the  heights  of  heroism  on 
which  St.  James  stood  when  he  wrote, '  Count  it 
all  joy  when  ye  fall  into  manifold  trials.'  "  There 
was  a  moment  when  Christ  said  to  His  disciples, 
Blessed  are  ye  when  men  shall  reproach  you, 
and  persecute  you,  and  say  all  manner  of  evil 
against  you  falsely  for  My  name's  sake.  And 
He  bade  them  rejoice  and  be  exceeding  glad. 
But  in  this  petition  He  recognizes  the  frailty  of 
our  human  nature.  He  makes  concession  to  our 
weakness.  He  remembers  that  we  are  dust. 
This  prayer  interpreted,  paraphrased — it  is  as 
though  we  should  cry  in  our  realized  feebleness  : 

Our  Father.,  we  count  not  ourselves  amongst  the 
great  and  heroic  of  Thy  children.  TVe  are  not  of  the 
glorious  company  of  the  Apostles.,  the  goodly  fellowship 
of  the  Prophets.,  the  noble  army  of  Martyrs.  We 
dread  the  fiery  trial.  We  doubt  our  power  of  resist- 
ance. Let  us  not  be  tried  beyond  our  strength  to 
withstand.  We  are  Thy  children.,  we  know  ;  but  we 
are  only  little  children.,  weak.,  ignorant.,  and  we  dare 
not  confront  the  storms  and  dangers  which  the  great 
brave  men  and  women  of  old  have  faced  with  intrepid 
hearts.  We  know  our  weakness.  We  know  not 
what    these    unexplored    dangers  are.     Have   mercy 

[  V3] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

upon  our  ignorance  and  our  waywardness  and  our 
feebleness.  Bring  us  not  into  the  storm  of  conflict 
that  may  overwhelm  us  nor  the  fiery  trial  which  may 
destroy  our  faith.  Our  Father^  bring  us  not  into 
temptation  too  great  and  hard  for  us  ! 

Perhaps  it  seems  to  you  an  anti-climax  ?  Ah, 
well ;  if  you  are  so  strong  and  so  splendid  in 
your  strength,  if  you  know  that  nothing  can 
move  you  from  your  heroic  devotion  to  duty ;  if 
you  know  that  neither  the  cares  of  this  world, 
nor  the  deceitfulness  of  riches,  nor  gain  nor  loss 
nor  love  nor  glory  nor  the  desire  of  the  eyes  nor 
the  pride  of  life  nor  all  the  kingdoms  of  the  world 
can  seduce  you  from  a  life  of  holiness  nor  shake 
your  faith  in  God — so  be  it !  This  cry  of  weak- 
ness is  not  for  you.  Only  the  ancient  warning 
speaks  :  Let  him  that  thinketh  he  stand,  take 
heed  lest  he  fall.  Paul,  when  he  was  weak,  felt 
himself  to  be  strong.  Perhaps  when  we  feel 
ourselves  strong,  perhaps  then  we  are  weak. 
Perhaps  this  prayer  is  still  proper  upon  our  lips : 
Bring  us  not  into  temptation. 

But  it  does  not  end  here — God  be  thanked. 

But  deliver  us  from  the  evil — not  from  evil,  from 

the    evil.      From   what   evil  ?     If  there   is   any 

reality  in  the  prayer  it  is  here :  from  the  evil  in 

[174] 


Bring  Us  Not  Into  Temptation 

our  own  hearts  which  may  make  these  times  of 
testing  and  of  trial  a  menace  to  us !  Why 
should  responsibility  or  riches,  why  should  kind- 
ness or  love,  why  should  any  of  the  thousand  ex- 
periences of  life  involving  for  us  only  that  which 
is  intrinsically  good,  become  a  menace  to  us? 
Surely  because  of  that  in  ourselves  which  cor- 
rupts the  good  and  turns  it  to  evil  issues  !  If  a 
kindness  makes  a  churl  of  us,  what  churlishness 
there  must  be  in  our  hearts !  If  the  strife  for 
wealth  and  power  or  possession  of  wealth  and 
power  makes  us  cruel,  what  potentiality  of 
cruelty  there  must  be  hidden  somewhere  in  our 
souls  !  If  love  which  should  make  us  divine,  it- 
self divine  and  the  spark  of  divinity  in  us,  be- 
comes diabolic  in  its  operations  or  wakes  up  a 
lingering  diabolism  within  us,  what  evil,  base  and 
bestial,  there  must  be  in  our  nature  warring  with 
this  love  divine  !  If  the  love  of  man  or  woman 
or  of  God  freely  poured  out  upon  us  in  gifts  of 
unspeakable  richness  narrows,  hardens,  coars- 
ens, and  embitters  us — then,  what  depths  of 
unloveliness,  what  hateful  possibilities,  slumber 
within  our  souls  !  From  this  evil,  the  evil  in  us 
which  wakes  and  grows  and  strains  at  the  leash 
and  leaps  out  upon  us  and  masters  us  in  the  hour 
[175] 


The  Lord's  Prayer 

of  crisis,  Good  Lord  deliver  us !     In  our  weak- 
ness we  cry  to  Thee  : 

O  God^  bring  us  not  into  the  occasion  which  shall 

try  us  as  by  fire,  Tet  if  it  be  Thy  will  that  we  shall 
fall  into  manifold  trials^  if  Thou  in  Thy  love  dost  or- 
dain that  through  the  proving  of  our  faith  steadfast- 
ness shall  be  made  perfect^  then  we  pray  Thee^  take 
care  of  usy  O  our  Father^  and  deliver  us  from  the  evil 
within  us  which  taking  advantage  of  the  hour  of 
moral  crisis  might  turn  our  hearts  from  Thee  I  Thou 
doest  all  things  well.  Bring  us  not  into  temptation  ; 
yet  if  it  be  Thy  will  that  we  shall  grow  strong  through 
conflict  and  pure  through  resistance  of  desire.,  deliver 
us  from  the  evil  in  our  hearts.,  and  keep  us  so  near  unto 
Thyself  that  every  hour  of  every  day  while  life  shall 
last  for  ourselves  and  for  our  loved  ones  we  may  pray  : 

Our  Father,  who  art  in  heaven, 

Hallowed  be  Thy  name. 

Thy  Kingdom  come. 
Thy  will  be  done,  as  in  heaven,  so  on 

EARTH. 

Give  us  this  day  our  daily  bread. 
And  forgive  us  our  debts,  as  we  also 

have  forgiven  our  debtors. 
And  bring  us  not  into  temptation,  but 

deliver  us  from  the  evil, 

through  Jesus  Christ  our  Lord.,  Amen  ! 
2  [  176  ] 


Date  Due 


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